Two separate problems were identified in BIND's GeoIP code that
could lead to an assertion failure. One was triggered by use of
both IPv4 and IPv6 address families, the other by referencing
a GeoIP database in <
filename>
named.conf</
filename> which was
not installed. Both are covered by CVE-2014-8680. [RT #37672]
A less serious security flaw was also found in GeoIP: changes
to the <
command>geoip-directory</
command> option in
<
filename>
named.conf</
filename> were ignored when running
<
command>rndc reconfig</
command>. In theory, this could allow
<
command>named</
command> to allow access to unintended clients.
<
sect2 id="relnotes_features">
<
title>New Features</
title>
The serial number of a dynamically updatable zone can
<
command>rndc signing -serial <
replaceable>number</
replaceable> <
replaceable>zonename</
replaceable></
command>.
This is particularly useful with <
option>inline-signing</
option>
zones that have been reset. Setting the serial number to a value
larger than that on the slaves will trigger an AXFR-style
When answering recursive queries, SERVFAIL responses can now be
cached by the server for a limited time; subsequent queries for
the same query name and type will return another SERVFAIL until
the cache times out. This reduces the frequency of retries
when a query is persistently failing, which can be a burden
on recursive serviers. The SERVFAIL cache timeout is controlled
by <
option>servfail-ttl</
option>, which defaults to 10 seconds
and has an upper limit of 30.
The new <
command>rndc nta</
command> command can now be used to
set a "negative trust anchor" (NTA), disabling DNSSEC validation for
a specific domain; this can be used when responses from a domain
are known to be failing validation due to administrative error
rather than because of a spoofing attack. NTAs are strictly
temporary; by default they expire after one hour, but can be
configured to last up to one week. The default NTA lifetime
can be changed by setting the <
option>nta-lifetime</
option> in
<
filename>
named.conf</
filename>. When added, NTAs are stored in a
file (<
filename><
replaceable>viewname</
replaceable>.nta</
filename>)
in order to persist across restarts of the named server.
The EDNS Client Subnet (ECS) option is now supported for
authoritative servers; if a query contains an ECS option then
ACLs containing <
option>geoip</
option> or <
option>ecs</
option>
elements can match against the the address encoded in the option.
This can be used to select a view for a query, so that different
answers can be provided depending on the client network.
The EDNS EXPIRE option has been implemented on the client
side, allowing a slave server to set the expiration timer
correctly when transferring zone data from another slave
A new <
option>masterfile-style</
option> zone option controls
the formatting of text zone files: When set to
<
literal>full</
literal>, the zone file will dumped in
single-line-per-record format.
<
command>dig +ednsopt</
command> can now be used to set
arbitrary EDNS options in DNS requests.
<
command>dig +ednsflags</
command> can now be used to set
yet-to-be-defined EDNS flags in DNS requests.
<
command>dig +[no]ednsnegotiation</
command> can now be used enable /
disable EDNS version negotiation.
<
command>dig +header-only</
command> can now be used to send
queries without a question section.
<
command>dig +ttlunits</
command> causes <
command>dig</
command>
to print TTL values with time-unit suffixes: w, d, h, m, s for
weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds.
<
command>dig +zflag</
command> can be used to set the last
unassigned DNS header flag bit. This bit in normally zero.
<
command>dig +dscp=<
replaceable>value</
replaceable></
command>
can now be used to set the DSCP code point in outgoing query
<
option>serial-update-method</
option> can now be set to
<
literal>date</
literal>. On update, the serial number will
be set to the current date in YYYYMMDDNN format.
<
command>dnssec-signzone -N date</
command> also sets the serial
<
command>named -L <
replaceable>filename</
replaceable></
command>
causes named to send log messages to the specified file by
default instead of to the system log.
The rate limiter configured by the
<
option>serial-query-rate</
option> option no longer covers
NOTIFY messages; those are now separately controlled by
<
option>notify-rate</
option> and
<
option>startup-notify-rate</
option> (the latter of which
controls the rate of NOTIFY messages sent when the server
is first started up or reconfigured).
The default number of tasks and client objects available
for serving lightweight resolver queries have been increased,
and are now configurable via the new <
option>lwres-tasks</
option>
and <
option>lwres-clients</
option> options in
Log output to files can now be buffered by specifying
<
command>buffered yes;</
command> when creating a channel.
<
command>delv +tcp</
command> will exclusively use TCP when
<
command>named</
command> will now check to see whether
other name server processes are running before starting up.
This is implemented in two ways: 1) by refusing to start
if the configured network interfaces all return "address
in use", and 2) by attempting to acquire a lock on a file
specified by the <
command>lock-file</
option> option or
the <
command>-X</
command> command line option. The
Specifying <
literal>none</
literal> will disable the lock
<
command>rndc delzone</
command> can now be applied to zones
which were configured in <
filename>
named.conf</
filename>;
it is no longer restricted to zones which were added by
<
command>rndc addzone</
command>. (Note, however, that
this does not edit <
filename>
named.conf</
filename>; the zone
must be removed from the configuration or it will return
when <
command>named</
command> is restarted or reloaded.)
<
command>rndc modzone</
command> can be used to reconfigure
a zone, using similar syntax to <
command>rndc addzone</
command>.
<
command>rndc showzone</
command> displays the current
configuration for a specified zone.
Added server-side support for pipelined TCP queries. Clients
may continue sending queries via TCP while previous queries are
processed in parallel. Responses are sent when they are
ready, not necessarily in the order in which the queries were
To revert to the former behavior for a particular
client address or range of addresses, specify the address prefix
in the "keep-response-order" option. To revert to the former
behavior for all clients, use "keep-response-order { any; };".
The new <
command>mdig</
command> command is a version of
<
command>dig</
command> that sends multiple pipelined
queries and then waits for responses, instead of sending one
query and waiting the response before sending the next. [RT #38261]
To enable better monitoring and troubleshooting of RFC 5011
trust anchor management, the new <
command>rndc managed-keys</
command>
can be used to check status of trust anchors or to force keys
to be refreshed. Also, the managed-keys data file now has
easier-to-read comments. [RT #38458]
An <
command>--enable-querytrace</
command> configure switch is
now available to enable very verbose query tracelogging. This
option can only be set at compile time. This option has a
negative performance impact and should be used only for
A new <
command>tcp-only</
command> option can be specified
in <
command>server</
command> statements to force
<
command>named</
command> to connect to the specified
server via TCP. [RT #37800]
<
sect2 id="relnotes_changes">
<
title>Feature Changes</
title>
ACLs containing <
command>geoip asnum</
command> elements were
not correctly matched unless the full organization name was
specified in the ACL (as in
<
command>geoip asnum "AS1234 Example, Inc.";</
command>).
They can now match against the AS number alone (as in
<
command>geoip asnum "AS1234";</
command>).
When using native PKCS#11 cryptography (
i.e.,
<
command>configure --enable-native-pkcs11</
command>) HSM PINs
of up to 256 characters can now be used.
NXDOMAIN responses to queries of type DS are now cached separately
from those for other types. This helps when using "grafted" zones
of type forward, for which the parent zone does not contain a
delegation, such as local top-level domains. Previously a query
of type DS for such a zone could cause the zone apex to be cached
as NXDOMAIN, blocking all subsequent queries. (Note: This
change is only helpful when DNSSEC validation is not enabled.
"Grafted" zones without a delegation in the parent are not a
recommended configuration.)
Update forwarding performance has been improved by allowing
a single TCP connection to be shared between multiple updates.
By default, <
command>nsupdate</
command> will now check
the correctness of hostnames when adding records of type
A, AAAA, MX, SOA, NS, SRV or PTR. This behavior can be
disabled with <
command>check-names no</
command>.
Added support for OPENPGPKEY type.
The names of the files used to store managed keys and added
zones for each view are no longer based on the SHA256 hash
of the view name, except when this is necessary because the
view name contains characters that would be incompatible with use
as a file name. For views whose names do not contain forward
slashes ('/'), backslashes ('\'), or capital letters - which
could potentially cause namespace collision problems on
case-insensitive filesystems - files will now be named
consistent behavior when upgrading, if a file using the old
name format is found to exist, it will continue to be used.
"rndc" can now return text output of arbitrary size to
the caller. (Prior to this, certain commands such as
"rndc tsig-list" and "rndc zonestatus" could return
Errors reported when running <
command>rndc addzone</
command>
(
e.g., when a zone file cannot be loaded) have been clarified
to make it easier to diagnose problems.
When encountering an authoritative name server whose name is
an alias pointing to another name, the resolver treats
this as an error and skips to the next server. Previously
this happened silently; now the error will be logged to
the newly-created "cname" log category.
If named is not configured to validate the answer then
allow fallback to plain DNS on timeout even when we know
the server supports EDNS. This will allow the server to
potentially resolve signed queries when TCP is being
<
sect2 id="relnotes_bugs">
<
command>dig</
command>, <
command>host</
command> and
<
command>nslookup</
command> aborted when encountering
a name which, after appending search list elements,
exceeded 255 bytes. Such names are now skipped, but
processing of other names will continue. [RT #36892]
The error message generated when
<
command>named-checkzone</
command> or
<
command>named-checkconf -z</
command> encounters a
<
option>$TTL</
option> directive without a value has
been clarified. [RT #37138]
Semicolon characters (;) included in TXT records were
incorrectly escaped with a backslash when the record was
displayed as text. This is actually only necessary when there
are no quotation marks. [RT #37159]
When files opened for writing by <
command>named</
command>,
such as zone journal files, were referenced more than once
in <
filename>
named.conf</
filename>, it could lead to file
corruption as multiple threads wrote to the same file. This
is now detected when loading <
filename>
named.conf</
filename>
and reported as an error. [RT #37172]
When checking for updates to trust anchors listed in
<
option>managed-keys</
option>, <
command>named</
command>
now revalidates keys based on the current set of
active trust anchors, without relying on any cached
record of previous validation. [RT #37506]
(<
command>configure --with-tuning=large</
command>) caused
problems on some platforms by setting a socket receive
buffer size that was too large. This is now detected and
corrected at run time. [RT #37187]
When NXDOMAIN redirection is in use, queries for a name
that is present in the redirection zone but a type that
is not present will now return NOERROR instead of NXDOMAIN.
Due to an inadvertent removal of code in the previous
release, when <
command>named</
command> encountered an
authoritative name server which dropped all EDNS queries,
it did not always try plain DNS. This has been corrected.
A regression caused nsupdate to use the default recursive servers
rather than the SOA MNAME server when sending the UPDATE.
Adjusted max-recursion-queries to accommodate the smaller
initial packet sizes used in BIND 9.10 and higher when
contacting authoritative servers for the first time.
Built-in "empty" zones did not correctly inherit the
"allow-transfer" ACL from the options or view. [RT #38310]
Two leaks were fixed that could cause <
command>named</
command>
processes to grow to very large sizes. [RT #38454]
Fixed some bugs in RFC 5011 trust anchor management,
including a memory leak and a possible loss of state
Asynchronous zone loads were not handled correctly when the
zone load was already in progress; this could trigger a crash
<
title>End of Life</
title>
The end of life for BIND 9.11 is yet to be determined but
will not be before BIND 9.13.0 has been released for 6 months.
<
sect2 id="relnotes_thanks">
Thank you to everyone who assisted us in making this release possible.
If you would like to contribute to ISC to assist us in continuing to
make quality open source software, please visit our donations page at