303N/A BIND version 9 is a major rewrite of nearly all aspects of the
303N/A underlying BIND architecture. Some of the important features of
303N/A TSIG (signed DNS requests)
303N/A Answers DNS queries on IPv6 sockets
303N/A IPv6 resource records (AAAA)
303N/A Experimental IPv6 Resolver Library
303N/A - DNS Protocol Enhancements
303N/A IXFR, DDNS, Notify, EDNS0
303N/A Improved standards conformance
844N/A One server process can provide multiple "views" of
303N/A the DNS namespace,
e.g. an "inside" view to certain
303N/A clients, and an "outside" view to others.
303N/A - Multiprocessor Support
303N/A - Improved Portability Architecture
844N/A BIND version 9 development has been underwritten by the following
303N/A Compaq Computer Corporation
303N/A Process Software Corporation
303N/A Network Associates, Inc.
303N/A Stichting NLnet - NLnet Foundation
303N/A For a summary of functional enhancements in previous
303N/A releases, see the HISTORY file.
303N/A For a detailed list of user-visible changes from
303N/A previous releases, see the CHANGES file.
303N/A BIND 9.9.0 includes a number of changes from BIND 9.6 and earlier
303N/A releases. New features include:
303N/A - NXDOMAIN redirection.
303N/A - Improved scalability from using multiple threads to
303N/A - New 'rndc flushtree' command clears all data under a given
303N/A name from the DNS cache.
303N/A - New 'rndc sync' command dumps pending changes in a dynamic zone
303N/A - The 'also-notify' option now takes the same syntax as
303N/A 'masters', so it can used named masterlists and TSIG keys.
303N/A - 'auto-dnssec' zones can now have NSEC3 parameters set prior
303N/A - 'dnssec-signzone -D' writes an output file containing only DNSSEC
303N/A data, which can be included by the primary zone file.
303N/A - 'dnssec-signzone -R' forces removal of signatures that are
303N/A not expired but were created by a key which no longer exists.
303N/A - 'dnssec-signzone -X' allows a separate expiration date to
303N/A be specified for DNSKEY signatures from other signatures.
303N/A - New '-L' option to dnssec-keygen, dnssec-settime, and
dnssec-keyfromlabel sets the default TTL for the key.
- dnssec-dsfromkey now supports reading from standard input,
to make it easier to convert DNSKEY to DS.
- RFC 1918 reverse zones have been added to the empty-zones
- Dynamic updates can now optionally set the zone's SOA serial
number to the current UNIX time.
DNS64 support (AAAA synthesis only initially).
BIND 9.7.0 includes a number of changes from BIND 9.6 and earlier
releases. Most are intended to simplify DNSSEC configuration.
- Fully automatic signing of zones by "named".
- Simplified configuration of DNSSEC Lookaside Validation (DLV).
- Simplified configuration of Dynamic DNS, using the "ddns-confgen"
command line tool or the "local" update-policy option. (As a side
effect, this also makes it easier to configure automatic zone
- New named option "attach-cache" that allows multiple views to
- DNS rebinding attack prevention.
- New default values for dnssec-keygen parameters.
- Support for RFC 5011 automated trust anchor maintenance
- Smart signing: simplified tools for zone signing and key
- The "statistics-channels" option is now available on Windows.
- A new DNSSEC-aware libdns API for use by non-BIND9 applications
- On some platforms, named and other binaries can now print out
a stack backtrace on assertion failure, to aid in debugging.
- A "tools only" installation mode on Windows, which only installs
dig, host, nslookup and nsupdate.
- Improved PKCS#11 support, including Keyper support and explicit
OpenSSL engine selection.
Known issues in this release:
- In rare cases, DNSSEC validation can leak memory. When this
happens, it will cause an assertion failure when named exits,
but is otherwise harmless. A fix exists, but was too late for
this release; it will be included in BIND 9.7.1.
- If you had built BIND 9.6 with any of ALLOW_NSEC3PARAM_UPDATE,
ALLOW_SECURE_TO_INSECURE or ALLOW_INSECURE_TO_SECURE defined, then
you should ensure that all changes that are in progress have
completed prior to upgrading to BIND 9.7. BIND 9.7 implements
those features in a way which is not backwards compatible.
- Prior releases had a bug which caused HMAC-SHA* keys with long
secrets to be used incorrectly. Fixing this bug means that older
versions of BIND 9 may fail to interoperate with this version
when using TSIG keys. If this occurs, the new "isc-hmac-fixup"
tool will convert a key with a long secret into a form that works
correctly with all versions of BIND 9. See the "isc-hmac-fixup"
man page for additional details.
- Revoking a DNSSEC key with "dnssec-revoke" changes its key ID.
It is possible for the new key ID to collide with that of a
different key. Newly generated keys will not have this problem,
as "dnssec-keygen" looks for potential collisions before
generating keys, but exercise caution if using key revokation
with keys that were generated by older versions of BIND 9. See
the Administrator's Reference Manual, section 4.10 ("Dynamic
Trust Anchor Management") for more details.
- A bug was fixed in which a key's scheduled inactivity date was
stored incorectly. Users who participated in the 9.7.0 BETA test
and had DNSSEC keys with scheduled inactivity dates will need to
reset those keys' dates using "dnssec-settime -I".
BIND 9 currently requires a UNIX system with an ANSI C compiler,
basic POSIX support, and a 64 bit integer type.
We've had successful builds and tests on the following systems:
NetBSD
3.x, 4.0-beta, 5.0-beta
Solaris 8, 9, 9 (x86), 10
NOTE: As of BIND 9.5.1, 9.4.3, and 9.3.6, older versions of
Windows, including Windows NT and Windows 2000, are no longer
We have recent reports from the user community that a supported
version of BIND will build and run on the following systems:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5
Do not use a parallel "make".
Several environment variables that can be set before running
configure will affect compilation:
The C compiler to use. configure tries to figure
out the right one for supported systems.
C compiler flags. Defaults to include -g
and/or -O2
as supported by the compiler.
System header file directories. Can be used to specify
where add-on thread or IPv6 support is, for example.
Defaults to empty string.
Any additional preprocessor symbols you want defined.
Defaults to empty string.
-DISC_FACILITY=LOG_LOCAL0
Enable DNSSEC signature chasing support in dig.
-DDIG_SIGCHASE=1 (sets -DDIG_SIGCHASE_TD=1 and
Disable dropping queries from particular well known ports.
Sibling glue checking in named-checkzone is enabled by default.
To disable the default check set. -DCHECK_SIBLING=0
named-checkzone checks out-of-zone addresses by default.
To disable this default set. -DCHECK_LOCAL=0
To create the default pid files in ${localstatedir}/run rather
than ${localstatedir}/run/{named,lwresd}/ set.
Enable workaround for Solaris kernel bug about
/dev/poll -DISC_SOCKET_USE_POLLWATCH=1
The watch timeout is also configurable,
e.g.,
-DISC_SOCKET_POLLWATCH_TIMEOUT=20
Linker flags. Defaults to empty string.
The following need to be set when cross compiling.
BUILD_CPPFLAGS (optional)
-DNEED_OPTARG=1 (optarg is not declared in <
unistd.h>)
To build shared libraries, specify "--with-libtool" on the
For the server to support DNSSEC, you need to build it
with crypto support. You must have OpenSSL 0.9.5a
or newer installed and specify "--with-openssl" on the
configure command line. If OpenSSL is installed under
a nonstandard prefix, you can tell configure where to
look for it using "--with-openssl=/prefix".
On some platforms it is necessary to explictly request large
file support to handle files bigger than 2GB. This can be
done by "--enable-largefile" on the configure command line.
On some platforms, BIND 9 can be built with multithreading
support, allowing it to take advantage of multiple CPUs.
You can specify whether to build a multithreaded BIND 9
by specifying "--enable-threads" or "--disable-threads"
on the configure command line. The default is operating
Support for the "fixed" rrset-order option can be enabled
or disabled by specifying "--enable-fixed-rrset" or
"--disable-fixed-rrset" on the configure command line.
The default is "disabled", to reduce memory footprint.
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
--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
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
If you need to re-run configure please run "make distclean" first.
This will ensure that all the option changes take.
Building with gcc is not supported, unless gcc is the vendor's usual
compiler (
e.g. the various BSD systems, Linux).
* gcc-3.2.1 and gcc-3.1.1 is known to cause problems with solaris-x86.
* gcc prior to gcc-3.2.3 ultrasparc generates incorrect code at -02.
* gcc-3.3.5 powerpc generates incorrect code at -02.
* Irix, MipsPRO 7.4.1m is known to cause problems.
A limited test suite can be run with "make test". Many of
the tests require you to configure a set of virtual IP addresses
SunOS 4 requires "printf" to be installed to make the shared
libraries. sh-utils-1.16 provides a "printf" which compiles
The BIND 9 Administrator Reference Manual is included with the
source distribution in DocBook XML and HTML format, in the
Some of the programs in the BIND 9 distribution have man pages
in their directories. In particular, the command line
There is now also a set of man pages for the lwres library.
If you are upgrading from BIND 8, please read the migration
Frequently asked questions and their answers can be found in
Additional information on various subjects can be found
in the other README files.
Bug Reports and Mailing Lists
Bugs reports should be sent to
To join the BIND Users mailing list, send mail to
bind-users-request@isc.org
archives of which can be found via
If you're planning on making changes to the BIND 9 source
code, you might want to join the BIND Workers mailing list.
bind-workers-request@isc.org