
This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition
Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
Securing BIND
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Performance
D. J. Bernstein claims that djbdns has much better speed and reliability, and a
much smaller RAM footprint, than BIND. Several acquaintances of mine who
administer extremely busy DNS servers rely on djbdns for this reason.
So, djbdns is superior to BIND in every way, and the vast majority of DNS adminis-
trators who use BIND are dupes, right? Maybe, but I doubt it. djbdns has compel-
ling advantages, particularly its performance. If you need a caching-only nameserver
but not an actual DNS authority for your domain, djbdns is clearly a leaner solution
than BIND. But the IETF is moving DNS in two key directions that Mr. Bernstein
apparently thinks are misguided, and therefore that he refuses to support in djbdns.
The first is DNSSEC. For secure zone transfers, djbdns must be used with rsync and
OpenSSH, since djbdns does not support TSIGs or any other DNSSEC mechanism.
The second is IPv6, which djbdns does not support in the manner recommended by
the IETF (which is not to say that Mr. Bernstein is completely against IPv6; he
objects to the way the IETF recommends it be used by DNS).
So, which software package do you choose? If performance is your primary concern,
if you believe djbdns is inherently more secure than BIND (even BIND configured
the way I’m about ...