Please be gentle

[Danny Mayer]

At 08:38 PM 1/3/02, ComCity wrote:

>I'm sending this message and prepared to get only slightly flamed because I
>know I'm severly out-of-touch.  Please be gentle.
>
>I've been running Bind for NT that I believe was originally distributed by
>Internet Software, ver 4.9.5.  its about 6 or 7 years old.  I know the
>Internet has changed alot in 7 years.  Hey, up to know, its been working
>like a champ...why reck a good thing.  I know there are some denial of
>service attack problems and other things but up to know...we've never had
>them I don't think.

If you absolutely MUST run BIND 4, you should be running BIND 4.9.8 which
includes a number of security bug fixes.

>Recently, though for some reason, we have noticed that the TCP port 53 of
>the secondary nameserver is being flagged as "down" for some reason by our
>monitoring software.  The UDP port 53 seems to be showing up and working
>fine.  I believe that the nameserver is this condition is for the most part
>working but we can't monitor it anymore.

What tells you that TCP port 53 is down? What are you using for monitoring
software? What makes you think that there's a problem with the nameserver?
Why can't you monitor it anymore?

>First question:  Does anyone know why this could be occurring

No, since you haven't shown us WHAT the perceived problem is.  Aren't there
any logs?

>So, given this problem, I guess I'm forced to look for a resolution and thus
>"create new problems".  So, I went looking for the next version but it
>doesn't appear that a post-compiled version of Bind exists anymore for NT.
>And, I know that Microsoft now distributes some form of Bind or a Nameserver
>with the Operating System.  So that brings up the next question:

BIND 8.2.5 for Win32 and BIND 9.2.0 for Win32 is available from the ISC Web
site: http://www.isc.org/products/BIND/ for details.

>Second question:  Should I be running the M$ nameserver or should I continue
>looking for an NT version of Bind?  Someone must have an opinion on this.
I doubt that anyone on this mailing list would be recommending the M$
nameserver since it's the BIND mailing list! In any case you need to run
as a Windows Server to run MS DNS. BIND doesn't require that.

>I don't have access to any C compiler here on NT....so

No need.  The above location has pointers to Win32 Binary kits.

>Third question:  Is there an NT executable version of Bind out there someone
>like the old 4.9.5?

Larry Kahn had been keeping somewhat uptodate a version of BIND 4.9.x but
I have no details. In any case we recommend at least BIND 8.2.5 for all of the
security and bug fixes and the ability to handle more features that have been
introduced into BIND 8.

         Danny