The Goals of BIND 9

BIND 9 is a major revision of BIND and will, not too long after it's finished (which is expected sometime in the fall of 2000), be the recommended version of BIND.

BIND 9 addresses some major problems in BIND 8. It became obvious that BIND 8 was not up to the demands of the future. ISC has, on behalf of the Internet community in general, and some named sponsors specifically, undertaken a major rewrite of BIND.

Available when I write this, July 2000, is BIND 9.0.0rc1, the first release candidate release of the BIND 9 code, containing the final set of features slated for BIND 9.0.0. BIND 9 will, when it is released, be available from ftp.isc.org. Please see Chapter 15, "Compiling and Maintaining BIND," for more information about getting, compiling, and maintaining BIND. The ISC also has a mailing list for BIND 9 users; email [e-mail] to subscribe.

In the words of the ISC, BIND 9 was designed with these goals in mind:

• Scalability

  • nThread safety

  • Multiprocessor scalability

  • Support for very large zones

• Security

  • Support for DNSSEC

  • Support for TSIG

  • Auditability (code and operation)

  • Firewall support (split DNS)

• Portability

• Maintainability

• Protocol Enhancements

  • IXFR, DDNS, Notify, EDNS0

  • Improved standards conformance

• Operational enhancements

  • High availability and reliability

  • Support for alternative backend databases

• IP version 6 support

  • IPv6 resource records (A6, DNAME, and so on)

  • Bitstring labels

  • nAPIs