[ On Saturday, November 16, 2002 at 19:46:03 (-0500), Andrew Brown wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: switching from bind8 to bind9
>
> which, while still parsable, also seems like a rather gratuitous
> change.

It's a log entry, and essentially a debugging one, for goodness sake!

The more humanly readable, and the more complete, the better IMVNSHO.


> that's still a cycle of "try to start", "try to fix", "try to start",
> that most people would not like to deal with.

I can supply fixed templates for the config files, etc., if anyone wants
to use them!  ;-)

(FYI I include full templates for all the RFC 1918 reverse zones too)

> >Worse though is that some of those features are crucial for some uses.
> >For example the "host-statistics" option allows the operator of a
> >recursive caching nameserver to determine where any records in the cache
> >were learned from (and when).
> 
> yeah.  like that.  is that gone, too?  i didn't have to remove that
> one to get bind9 to start, but i'd be dismayed to learn that it didn't
> do anything any more.

"rndc dumpb" and be dismayed.

.... and if you read the logs on startup you'll see something like:

Nov 16 20:35:39 myhost named[7274]: /etc/named.conf:23: option 'host-statistics' is not implemented


> >I consider the full "check-names" feature set quite critical for
> >production use too.
> 
> i've never used that.

never say never.  (you can't turn it off now for zone files, FYI, but I
can't turn it on for responses and slave files -- we both lose :-)

> templates that require people to fill in keys.  which most people
> would rather not deal with.  considering, though, that the named
> script in rc.d would have to be rewritten somewhat anyway, i suppose
> an "automated build" of rndc.conf could be stuffed in at that point.

Yes, templates can, almost by definition, be automatically filled out.
I've just been too lazy to script it myself.

(hmmmm.... I wonder if the key has to be generated in the recommended
way, or will any approximately format-conforming string of random
characters serve as a shared key?)

> whereas i haven't really looked at the bind9 code (except insofar as i
> noticed it was totally different; a fact that i fully expected), but i
> haven't had much trouble being the bind8 source to my will.

you must be a lot more lenient on the code you work with than I am.  :-)

> >I'm most interested in what might be done to update the resolver library
> >code....  (especially since bugs in that code that were discovered and
> >documented and fixed by some folks about five years ago weren't fixed in
> >NetBSD until just the other day (yes I know I should have been keeping
> >my eyes open for such things too))
> 
> off the top of my head, i suppose symbol renaming would be the easiest
> way to go, so that the updated bind4 api/abi could be kept in place
> for backwards compat reasons, but so that newer applications would get
> the bind9 routines.  but that's just me.

I don't think it's that simple, though others have looked at this a lot
more closely than I have....

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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