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Open Source BIND Alternative Launches

Posted by kdawson on Wed May 21, 2008 07:04 AM
from the ties-that-bind dept.
Software The Internet
bednarz writes "A group of experts on Tuesday released an open source alternative to the BIND DNS server. The new software — dubbed Unbound 1.0 — is a recursive DNS server. From its first prototype in 2004, Unbound was designed to be a faster, more secure replacement for BIND. Unbound supports DNS security extensions (DNSSEC), which authenticate DNS lookups but are not yet widely deployed because they rely on a public key infrastructure. Unbound was released to open source developers by NLnet Labs, VeriSign, Nominet and Kirei."
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Submission: Open-source BIND alternative launches by bednarz (1026650)
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  • Powerdns anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by superskippy (772852) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @07:06AM (#23490740)
    We use powerdns_recursor which seems very similar, and is very good.

    • Re:Powerdns anyone? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 21 2008, @07:40AM (#23491064)
      We use powerdns_recursor which seems very similar, and is very good.

      Return to parent comment.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by num42 (614006)
        We use PowerDNS recursor at a large german DSL ISP and i simply must say it totally rocks. When we - which you can read as 'i' btw. ;-) - were still on BIND9.(3|4) i had crashing named processes at least once a day, never had a single crash of a pdns_recursor process that wasn't my own fault until this day. Also the PowerDNS community is a nice bunch of people. Come visit us at #powerdns on IRCnet.
        \o/

        As for unbound, yeah it sure looks interesting but don't trust the benchmark, that one simply doesn't look l
      • // We use powerdns_recursor which seems very similar, and is very good.

        // Return to parent comment.

        Dang it, I want to read further into the thread but I keep getting a stack overflow before I can get past the second comment.

  • It's not... (Score:5, Informative)

    by cosmocain (1060326) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @07:10AM (#23490774)
    ...a DNS-Server.

    Taken from here [unbound.net]: Unbound is a validating, recursive, and caching DNS resolver. Huh, frontpage-information is always quite hard to get.

    • Re:It's not... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by value_added (719364) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @07:32AM (#23490952)
      I've only had a quick glance, but it appears you're correct.

      Seems this is a first: both the submission and the article are absurdly wrong.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by zn0k (1082797)
        That might be due to the website of the distributor calling the product a DNS server.

        Taken from http://www.nlnetlabs.nl/ [nlnetlabs.nl]:

        Recent Software Updates
        Unbound 1.0.0
        Tue May 20 2008
        The public release of Unbound, a fast recursive validating caching DNS server.

      • Re:It's not... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Bogtha (906264) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @09:57AM (#23492684)

        Seems this is a first: both the submission and the article are absurdly wrong.

        Never in the history of Slashdot has a comment been more deserving of the response "You must be new here".

    • For those of you who (like me) don't know the difference between the two, from wikipedia:

      DNS servers
      The Domain Name System consists of a hierarchical set of DNS servers. Each domain or subdomain has one or more authoritative DNS servers that publish information about that domain and the name servers of any domains "beneath" it. The hierarchy of authoritative DNS servers matches the hierarchy of domains. At the top of the hierarchy stand the root nameservers: the servers to query when looking up (resolving) a top-level domain name (TLD).

      DNS resolvers
      A resolver looks up the resource record information associated with nodes. A resolver knows how to communicate with name servers by sending DNS queries and heeding DNS responses.

      A DNS query may be either a recursive query or a non-recursive query:
      • A non-recursive query is one where the DNS server may provide a partial answer to the query (or give an error). DNS servers must support non-recursive queries.
      • A recursive query is one where the DNS server will fully answer the query (or give an error). DNS servers are not required to support recursive queries.
      The resolver (or another DNS server acting recursively on behalf of the resolver) negotiates use of recursive service using bits in the query headers.

      Resolving usually entails iterating through several name servers to find the needed information. However, some resolvers function simplistically and can communicate only with a single name server. These simple resolvers rely on a recursive query to a recursive name server to perform the work of finding information for them.
    • Slashdot Barbie says "research is hard".

    • Re:It's not... (Score:5, Informative)

      by spinkham (56603) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @07:48AM (#23491144)
      It IS a DNS server, just not an authoritative server. DNS servers come in 2 flavors, authoritative servers (which hold the actual info) and recursive servers (which do the looking up for a client).
      Most DNS servers do both, so "DNS server" means many different things depending on the context. When your ISP gives you a "DNS server" to use, it's a recursive server, not an authoratative server.
      The end user has a "stub resolver", which does not qualify as a server.

      For a more indepth discussion of DNS architecture and DNSSEC, you can check out "DNS for Rocket Scientists" here http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/ [zytrax.com] or a talk I gave on DNS security here:
      http://www.mavensecurity.com/presentations [mavensecurity.com]

  • djbdns (Score:3, Informative)

    by khundeck (265426) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @07:14AM (#23490808)
    I've been using djbdns as my BIND alternative for the last couple of years, and I've been very happy with it. Technically it was pretty straightforward to build/install. The only consideration seems to be whether you like the djb way of doing things (I do!) and the few Freedom wrinkles in the license. :-)

    http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html

    Kurt

    • Re:djbdns (Score:5, Informative)

      by oyenstikker (536040) <slashdot AT sbyrne DOT org> on Wednesday May 21 2008, @07:24AM (#23490882) Homepage Journal

      the few Freedom wrinkles in the license.

      djbdns is now in the public domain (as of December 2007). Before that, there was no license.

      http://cr.yp.to/distributors.html [cr.yp.to]

      • Re:djbdns (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 21 2008, @08:14AM (#23491400)
        It's also very small, extremely fast, highly modular, and extraordinarily robust. It could take the load of a root name server, if you had the bandwidth. It actually approaches the almost-mythical status of "bug-free software"; I certainly would be surprised by any remaining security or stability issues being discovered in it.

        The man himself can often come across as arrogant - but you can't deny with djbdns he's written extraordinarily stable, virtually bug-free code that he has now (along with almost all of his other work) explicitly gifted to the public domain. He deserves a little credit for that, imho, and djbdns certainly deserves being considered alongside any other DNS server.
        • Yes but he deserves scorn for the atrocity that is qmail.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by profplump (309017)
            I generally agree, and have recently switched from qmail-ldap to postfix myself. But keep the historical context in mind. Back in say 1998, postfix wasn't an option (version 1.0 in 2001), and qmail was waaaaaay better than sendmail.

            Also keep in mind that qmail proper is 10 years old, and things like RFC 2822 didn't exist when it was written. qmail-ldap provides a much more modern view on email -- including all the goodies like TLS/SSL support, pre-acceptance address verification, etc. -- to the same basic s
    • I use a perhaps not-well-known alternative called ldapdns [sourceforge.net], which used to be based on the DJBDNS code. It gets its DNS information from LDAP, which is very, very nice -- I can make a change in LDAP and the change is instant as opposed to making a change to the BIND stuff, which I then have to restart BIND, etc.

    • Re:djbdns is abandonware (Score:4, Informative)

      by EllynGeek (824747) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @10:03AM (#23492764)
      djbdns is abandonware. It hasn't had an update since 2001, and you can believe in perfect code that doesn't ever need updating if you want to, but I don't. DJB's crazy licensing meant that only patches could be distributed, not modified sources or binaries, which effectively killed any community support. Now that it's public domain it's possible for someone to pick it up and start maintaining it again, and I'll wait until that happens before using it again. I can live with DJB's complete disregard of filesystem conventions and stuffing a whole lot of new top-level directories for no good reason into the system, and creating a bunch of unnecessary new management daemons (daemontools). But not maintaining his own software makes it a no-go, especially something as crucial as name services.
      • I can't decide if that should be a new emo superhero or a BOFH-themed ceiling-cat variant.

        "Angry Maintainer is watching you masturbate." "Eww." "Why do you think he's angry?"

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by lysse (516445)

        Dan Bernstein's public demeanor makes Theo de Raadt look like Miss Manners.
        "It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sommbitch or another." (Jaynestown)

      • Re:Feh.... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Russ Nelson (33911) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @09:39AM (#23492448) Homepage
        Why do you need updates? I think that's one of djb's point: that if the software is written well, it doesn't need to be updated, and thus you don't need to form a relationship with the author.

          • Re:Feh.... (Score:4, Insightful)

            by schon (31600) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @08:39AM (#23491678) Homepage

            Theo admits if he is wrong straight away
            WHAT!??!?!

            When Theo is wrong, he *immediately* launches personal attacks, never once admitting the reality of the situation. (Linux devs were "inhuman" because they posted a GPL violation in a *public* repo to that repo's mailing list.)

            What colour is the sky in your world?

  • Java based DNS server? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 21 2008, @07:15AM (#23490816)
    Java seems like a logical way to go with this, considering the great track record of other Java web technologies (Tomcat, Jetty, etc).

    Is there anything out there?

  • FYI, bind9 is already open source (Score:5, Informative)

    by molo (94384) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @07:19AM (#23490844) Journal
    This posting makes it sound like bind9 is not sufficiently open/free. That is not correct, and kdawson should do a better job of editing to prevent biased postings like this.

    Bind9 is licensed under the ISC license, a BSD-like license. The full text of the license follows.

    -molo

    Copyright (C) 1996-2001 Internet Software Consortium.

    Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any
    purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
    copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.

    THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND INTERNET SOFTWARE CONSORTIUM
    DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL
    IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL
    INTERNET SOFTWARE CONSORTIUM BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT,
    INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING
    FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,
    NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION
    WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.

  • Are we supposed to trust.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bleh-of-the-huns (17740) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @07:21AM (#23490854)
    Anything with Verisign's named attached to it?

  • Both Open Source, Both BSD... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Manip (656104) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @07:23AM (#23490878)
    Both pieces of software are released under the same open source license, namely BSD.

    On top of that, given the history of security problems in this line of software I would wait a while before deploying Unbound on anything serious.

    Especially given the fact it sells its self as being more complex and big than its predecessor.

  • maradns (Score:3, Informative)

    by TheSlashaway (1032228) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @07:34AM (#23490982)
    This is one of the best: http://www.maradns.org/ [maradns.org]

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by EllynGeek (824747)
      I agree, Maradns is an excellent authoritative name server and caching resolver. Unlike the horrid lardy mess that is BIND, it handles very large loads, and it is easy to configure. BIND is a gawdawful bloated mess that should have been laughed into oblivion years ago. Maradns, NSD, and Powerdns are all far superior to BIND. They're sane to administer and much more robust. For LAN DHCP and DNS, try Dnsmasq. Friends don't let friends use BIND.

  • DNS is a big problem and it's getting bigger (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mseeger (40923) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @07:42AM (#23491076) Homepage
    Hi,

    DNS is one of the bottlenecks to come. For nearly every ISP, DNS traffic grows faster than the overall traffic.

    i'm doing a lot of consulting for large ISPs on DNS problems. BIND is good for small and medium ISPs but bad for large ones (as resolver, as primary or secondary nameserver).

    It doesn't work very well with Cache above 1GB and the multithreading is not very efficent. Startup (for servers with 100K zones) is very slow, restart (after changing the configuration) is risky if you decreased the number of masters for a secondary zone (core dump). The readability of the code is far from perfect and it doesn't seperate different functions very well (e.g. you cannot easily replace the caching algorithm). The handling of slow or dead servers could be improved too...

    So, i personaly welcome the new contender in the OSS nameserver arena ;-). Let the games begin...

    The best results (up today) i got with Nominum [nominum.com] ANS and CNS. It's neither FOSS nor cheap but really, really fast. We replaced at one customer 4 overloaded BIND systems (3 Ghz Dual Xeon, 4GB RAM, 2 BIND processes per system) with CNS on the same hardware (but only 2 systems) and the load barely reached 10%.

    Sincerely yours, Martin

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by darkuncle (4925)
      If DNS traffic is your bottleneck, you don't have a bottleneck.

      Seriously, "DNS traffic grows faster than the overall traffic"? Maybe if you're doing a lot of TCP-over-DNS (thanks, Dan Kaminsky), or if you are providing DNS hosting services. Otherwise, I fail to see how a primarily UDP-based, extremely lightweight protocol (designed for cacheing at every layer, mind you) can grow faster than HTTP or whatever your traffic is.

      Again, if DNS is your bottleneck, you've got something that's not designed properly,

      • Re:DNS is a big problem and it's getting bigger (Score:4, Interesting)

        by mseeger (40923) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @09:37AM (#23492430) Homepage
        Hi,

        If DNS traffic is your bottleneck, you don't have a bottleneck.

        Sorry, you missunderstood me. I didn't say DNS traffic is a bottleneck. I said DNS is the bottleneck and i meant the number of requests.

        Why do we get so many more DNS requests today:

        • Anti-SPAM-Systems use DNS to make their decisions.. A SPAM mail may cause several DNS requests on the receiving side.
        • Everyone and his dog is using small firewalls which regularly do a reverse DNS query per incoming connection. A new worm (even without any infection) can cause millions of DNS requests for a large ISP.
        • Web-Sites are heavily loaded with images/adds from other servers. This means a dozen or more DNS requests for a singe web page.
        • etc...

        While DNS is still a small percentage of the overall traffic, it can be a bottleneck. I slow caching nameserver (if its overloaded or as inefficent as a BIND in a large ISP environment) can severely decrease the "speed experience" of a fast DSL line. If you have an average answer time of 300ms for a DNS request from a caching nameserver, it really hurts. Just believe me...

        Iw ould agree that BIND nearly never is your biggest problem. But for big ISP it can be a big problem anyway. A lot of them already dumped BIND.

        Regards, Martin

        • yes, yes there are lots of DNS requests. And there is cacheing at every single layer of the infrastructure, including most importantly:
          * client resolver library
          * client's upstream nameservers (recursive-only generally, operated by their ISP)
          * any add'l upstream DNS architecture between the client's nameservers and the SOA

          point being that billions of DNS requests generated daily for e.g. google.com are NOT all individually served by Google's nameservers. A small percentage of the total actually comes all the way through; the rest are handled by cacheing (one of the primary design goals of the protocol).

          A proper architecture will do more to improve site performance (and reduce burden on the network) than any amount of changes to the software you're using to serve DNS. The slowdown you're referring to is much more likely to occur closer to the edge than in the core of the ISP (where DNS server performance are a factor).

          BIND is not the problem. DNS isn't even the problem (unless you've got some really boneheaded setups). _architecture_, in a general sense (from systems to storage to networking to web page content to CDN to GSLB to peering to geographic distribution of datacenters), is the problem. DNS is a very small facet of the overall problem (it can be a problem, granted - but it's hardly the most significant one, or even in the top 5 the vast majority of the time).

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Russ Nelson (33911)

      DNS is one of the bottlenecks to come. For nearly every ISP, DNS traffic grows faster than the overall traffic.
      Martin, have you tried setting your TTL larger than ten seconds?

      • Re:DNS is a big problem and it's getting bigger (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mseeger (40923) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @09:02AM (#23491978) Homepage
        Hi,

        Here we go the the "commercial software is better than open source" argument.

        Neither is open source better thean comercial nor is comercial better than open source. It all depends on the use. As i wrote, if you are a small ISP or a medium ISP and (e.g. 5K Zones, 10K DNS requests per second) BIND suits your needs. If you have 100K zones and 100K DNS requests per second, i doesn't. I mentioned Nominum because it's the best solution i have seen till today and i will benchmark Outbound against CNS and not BIND. Beating BIND is IMHO not a challenge....

        I personally hate BIND, and BIND is open source, but some secret sauce being twice as fast? I don't think so.

        I'm not in the secret sauce business ;-). I speak numbers and statistics. E.g. CNS is for high loads 10-20 times more CPU efficent than BIND as caching nameserver on the same hardware. The cache handling of BIND 8/9 really, really sucks :-(. A customer doesn't pay 80K $ just on my say so (unluckily). They run tests and to prove the business case.

        Remark: 90% of my customers run BIND and are happy with it. I do OSS and comercial software in a happy mix. Ideology is not my thing. Use the software (FOSS or comercial) that's better for the problem.

        Regards, Martin

          • Re:DNS is a big problem and it's getting bigger (Score:5, Informative)

            by mseeger (40923) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @11:08AM (#23493758) Homepage
            80 large for software? , and DNS software? are you nuts?

            I do IT as a living for 25 years now, so the answer to your question is YES.

            Do you realize how fast a computer you can get for $80K?

            The answer is YES again. I sell it too...

            Its just DNS software , why would you want to pay ANYTHING let along that much? Buying a faster computer to do the same thing makes a whole lot more scene.

            The answer here is NO. The problem with this thread and the discussion here is, that you underestimate the problem.

            Example: It's 2007. You have 4 Caching DNS servers on 3Ghz Dual Xeon, each runs a two BIND 8 processes. Each BIND process is bound to a specific IP address. The servers really work hard, but the DNS performance (time to answer, percentage of queries ansered) doesn't satisfy you. What do you do?

            OK, let's start:

            • The clever guy says: Dude, you're still running BIND 8. That's outdated. Switch to the new BIND 9! It's got multithreading. Use it and all you're sorrows are gone.
              The real world says: BIND 9 on a Dual CPU system brings you 140% of the performance of BIND 8. But you're running 2 processes on each system. Switching to BIND 9 decreases your performance per CPU for about 30%.
            • The clever guys replies: OK, buy four more machines. Use one BIND 9 on each of them.
              The real world says: OK, you increased your capacity by 40% while doubling the costs. This is a workaround but no solution...
            • The clever guy says: OK, buy 12 machines, put BIND 9 on all of them.
              The real world says: OK, no you qadruppeled your costs. Are you aware that managing a hardware costs more than the iron itself. And how, by the way, do you distribute the load?
            • The clever guy says: Oh, just use a load balancer.
              The real world takes it spreadsheet and says: Well a load balancer for that load costs something too. Any one here knows how to setup and configure ACME load balancer?
            • The clever guy says: OK, drop the load balancer. Just give the users the address of the new name servers by PPPoE.
              Ar this point the real world sighs: Ah, and you are aware that about 30+% have hardwired the name server.

            Believe me, this is the simplified version for beginners.

            Regards, Martin

      • Re:DNS is a big problem and it's getting bigger (Score:5, Interesting)

        by mseeger (40923) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @10:12AM (#23492906) Homepage
        Hi,
        If bind is your problem, your doing it wrong. Root F runs bind and I'm betting it does far more than your trivially small organisation with only 100k zones. Root F and its mirrors answer somewhere in excess of 1/3 of all top level queries.

        If you run BIND with 100K zones, it takes quite some time to come up and starts answering queries. If you do a reload, it has a dead time in between. Try it...As secondary it has bugs (for more than 12 months now) that may crash it. I just had customer who paid a lot of money to get it fixed by an external company. Of course the fix was sent to the BIND maintainers.

        As always, you can work around the problem. E.g. for the startup/reload problem you can use multiple server and load balancers, switch ip addresses, pull a rabbit out of your hat... It's all possible. The question is always: is it cost efficent? If you have to adopt your procedures to work with BIND, you may do so. A lot of companys prefer paying money and adopt the software to their procdures. Both ways may work.

        BIND doesn't have a performance problem as primary nameserver or secondary nameserver. It has a performance problem as a caching nameserver and a severe one. This is why i'm happy about Unbound.

        At last: Some root nameservers should always run BIND. We need at huge diversity of software for root server, even if it creates pains. Just for security reasons....

        Regards, Martin

        Disclaimer: I don't hate BIND, i don't love specific comercial products. The decision is always based on a lot of parameters. Price, FOSS vs. comercial, hardware or software based solution, Know How of the administrators... All goes into one pot. There is no one size fits all.

  • BIND isn't Open Source? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hitech69 (78566) on Wednesday May 21 2008, @07:45AM (#23491104) Homepage
    Am I missing something, when did BIND not qualify as Open Source?

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Enry (630)
        So I guess goths go for vampire taps?
      • I use Microsoft. Its vendor lock-in strategy surpasses every bondage artist's skill and administering Windows boxen makes my inner masochist cry from glee. And pain, of course.

        They also eat cute little puppies, which is fine with me as I'm a cat person.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Russ Nelson (33911)

      Which has been beaten up so much over the past decade that it's now (probably) pretty secure with most of the bugs worked out.
      Bugs are like cockroaches. When you stomp one, you know there are ten more like it. Thus, all the bugs found and fixed simply means that there are more bugs in bind that nobody has found yet.

      Security is written into software. It's not added after the fact, and security lapses cannot be fixed.

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