ISC Releases the First Look At BIND 10

Ethanol writes "Internet Systems Consortium, producers of BIND 9 (the most popular DNS implementation on the internet), have spent the past year working on a successor, BIND 10. It's entirely new code, redesigned and rewritten from the ground up, and now the first glimpse of what it will eventually look like has been released. 'This code is not intended for general use, and is known to be inefficient, difficult to work with, and riddled with bugs. These problems will all be fixed over the next couple of years, as functionality is added and refined, and the software matures. However, the codebase has a good framework for moving forward, and the software is capable of serving as a DNS server with significant functionality.' (Full disclosure: I work for ISC and I'm one of the engineers on the project.)"

Great. Just what the DNS infrastructure needs

[man_of_mr_e]

So we're throwing away all the code that has matured and spend a decade being looked at, and starting over with new buggy code that will be riddled with security vulnerabilities.

Nice.

Re:Great. Just what the DNS infrastructure needs

[FooAtWFU]

Yes. As opposed to hacking any new functionality that's needed into all that existing cruft and introducing subtle, hard-to-understand bugs and security vulnerabilities. Which is the trade-off, after all.

(We don't have to stop all development on anything new in the future ever just because we have one mature codebase. It's not like we're all deploying the stuff tomorrow.)

Re:Excellent

[rubycodez]

nope, Microsoft has the audacity to claim their bloated buggy crap is suitable for general use.

DJB might agree

[bugs2squash]

This code is not intended for general use, and is known to be inefficient, difficult to work with, and riddled with bugs Could apply to any version of BIND

Re:Great. Just what the DNS infrastructure needs

[larkost]

Tests are great for finding bug/problems you have already thought about. They are great for making sure that you don't make the same mistake again. However they don't reliably cover things you have not yet thought about. It is also really hard to write tests that cover complicated network interaction... and that is percicely what Bind must do.

Re:Great. Just what the DNS infrastructure needs

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why you hire information/computer security researchers (or researchers in general, but security people have a tendency to think "how can I break this" as opposed to "this should work and let's all play nice") and have them review and validate your design and your code. You discuss your assumptions with them, and make sure they are sane (or can at least be enforced, i.e. buffer sizes). This is one of the most critical pieces of software that humanity will rely on for a few more decades, I think we should put some real effort into it, as opposed to an ad-hoc throw code at the wall and see what sticks.

Re:A Monument to "Software Engineering"

[PCM2]

BIND is thirty years old and a core piece of Internet infrastructure.

Actually, BIND 9 -- "the most popular DNS implementation on the Internet," according to the submitter -- is merely 10 years old, and was itself a major rewrite of BIND 8. BIND 8 was only declared "end of life" in 2007.

That a completely new design and re-write of such a fundamentally important piece of software is "inefficient, difficult to work with, and riddled with bugs" highlights the continuing immaturity of the computer software industry.

Really. So the fact that a software developer plans to take "the next couple of years" (again, re: the submitter) to complete a software project is symptomatic of the total failure of an entire industry. Interesting perspective. Thanks for that.