l> BIND9 README

BIND9 README

Overview

BIND 9.1 is primarily a name server software distribution. In addition to the name server, it also includes a new lightweight stub resolver library and associated resolver daemon that fully support forward and reverse lookups of both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. This library is still considered experimental and is not a complete replacement for the BIND 8 resolver library. Applications that use the BIND 8 res_* functions to perform DNS lookups or dynamic updates still need to be linked against the BIND 8 libraries. For DNS lookups, they can also use the new "getrrsetbyname()" API.
BIND 9.1 is capable of acting as an authoritative server for DNSSEC secured zones. This functionality is believed to be stable and complete except for lacking support for wildcard records in secure zones.
When acting as a caching server, BIND 9.1 can be configured to perform DNSSEC secure resolution on behalf of its clients. This part of the DNSSEC implementation is still considered experimental. For detailed information about the state of the DNSSEC implementation, see the file doc/misc/dnssec.
There are a few known bugs:
On some systems, IPv6 and IPv4 sockets interact in unexpected ways. For details, see doc/misc/ipv6. To reduce the impact of these problems, the server no longer listens for requests on IPv6 addresses by default. If you need to accept DNS queries over IPv6, specify "listen-on-v6 { any; };" in the named.conf options statement.
There are known problems with thread signal handling under Solaris 2.6 and BSD/OS. We recommend disabling threads with "configure --disable-threads" on these platforms.
FreeBSD prior to 4.2 (and 4.2 if running as non-root) and OpenBSD prior to 2.8 log messages like "fcntl(8, F_SETFL, 4): Inappropriate ioctl for device". This is due to a bug in "/dev/random" and impacts the server's DNSSEC support.
--with-libtool does not work on AIX.

A bug in the Windows 2000 DNS server can cause zone transfers from a BIND 9 server to a W2K server to fail. For details, see the "Zone Transfers" section in doc/misc/migration.
For a detailed list of user-visible changes from previous releases, see the CHANGES file.

Building

BIND 9 currently requires a UNIX system with an ANSI C compiler, basic POSIX support, and a 64 bit integer type.
To build, just
./configure
make

Do not use a parallel "make".
Several environment variables that can be set before running configure will affect compilation:
        CC
        The C compiler to use.    configure tries to figure
        out the right one for supported systems.

        CFLAGS
        C compiler flags.  Defaults to include -g and/or -O2
        as supported by the compiler.

        STD_CINCLUDES
        System header file directories.     Can be used to specify
        where add-on thread or IPv6 support is, for example.
        Defaults to empty string.

        STD_CDEFINES
        Any additional preprocessor symbols you want defined.
        Defaults to empty string.
To build shared libraries, specify "--with-libtool" on the configure command line.
To build without multithreading, specify "--disable-threads" on the configure command line.
If your operating system has integrated support for IPv6, it will be used automatically. If you have installed KAME IPv6 separately, use "--with-kame[=PATH]" to specify its location.
"make install" will install "named" and the various BIND 9 libraries. By default, installation is into /usr/local, but this can be changed with the "--prefix" option when running "configure".
You may specify the option "--sysconfdir" to set the directory where configuration files like "named.conf" go by default, and "--localstatedir" to set the default parent directory of "run/named.pid". For backwards compatibility with BIND 8, --sysconfdir defaults to "/etc" and --localstatedir defaults to "/var" if no --prefix option is given. If there is a --prefix option, sysconfdir defaults to "$prefix/etc" and localstatedir defaults to "$prefix/var".
To see additional configure options, run "configure --help". Note that the help message does not reflect the BIND 8 compatibility defaults for sysconfdir and localstatedir.
If you're planning on making changes to the BIND 9 source, you should also "make depend". If you're using Emacs, you might find "make tags" helpful.
Building with gcc is not supported, unless gcc is the vendor's usual compiler (e.g. the various BSD systems, Linux).
A limited test suite can be run with "make test". Many of the tests require you to configure a set of virtual IP addresses on your system, and some require Perl; see bin/tests/system/README for details.
Linux systems do not provide useful core dumps for multithreaded programs unless the kernel patch in contrib/linux/coredump-patch has been applied. We recommend all Linux users to install this patch so that any server crashes can be properly diagnosed.

Documentation

The BIND 9 Administrator Reference Manual is included with the source distribution in DocBook XML and HTML format, in the doc/arm directory.
Some of the programs in the BIND 9 distribution have man pages under the doc/man directory. In particular, the command line options of "named" are documented in doc/man/bind/named.8. There is now also a set of man pages for the lwres library.
The man pages are currently not installed automatically by "make install".
If you are upgrading from BIND 8, please read the migration notes in doc/misc/migration. If you are upgrading from BIND 4, read doc/misc/migration-4to9.

Bug Reports and Mailing Lists

Bugs reports should be sent to dns-bugs@isc.org
To join the BIND 9 Users mailing list, send mail to dns-users-request@isc.org
If you're planning on making changes to the BIND 9 source code, you might want to join the BIND 9 Workers mailing list. Send mail to dns-workers-request@isc.org