An Overview of BIND 9 Documentation
  • 11 Dec 2023
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An Overview of BIND 9 Documentation

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Article Summary

For the benefit of our users, ISC maintains several documentation resources for BIND 9 and updates them as appropriate for each new release.

The BIND 9 Administrator Reference Manual

For documentation covering configuration syntax, detailed feature descriptions, command usage, and basic troubleshooting and security considerations, the best place to start is the BIND 9 Administrator Reference Manual, also known as "the ARM." Every source archive of BIND 9 distributed by ISC contains copies of the Administrator Reference Manual in HTML format; they can be obtained by downloading the source, or they can be read with a browser directly from the ISC downloads server. Recent versions of BIND also have online documentation, including PDFs, at ReadTheDocs.io.

Be sure to choose a version that applies to your major branch of BIND, as feature sets, command syntax, and default options for settings often differ between major branches (e.g. 9.11-ESV, 9.16, and 9.18).

These links provide access to the most recently released version of each major public branch of BIND currently undergoing development.

To find a copy of the ARM for other versions of BIND, visit the source archives, under the "/doc/arm" subdirectory of each specific version.

BIND 9 Release Notes

In addition to the comprehensive documentation in the BIND Administrator Reference Manual, ISC also publishes release notes for each official release of BIND 9. These notes highlight security fixes, bug fixes, new features, and feature changes and are intended to highlight the differences between each release version of BIND 9 and the version that preceded it.

Release notes can be found with the BIND 9 source distributions on the ISC downloads server.

CHANGES Files

Source distributions of BIND also include a CHANGES file.

CHANGES is a record of source code changes included in that specific version. Unlike the release notes, which cover only the changes since the last stable release version, the list in CHANGES goes back to the base version from which a specific BIND version was forked.

For more information about ISC's comprehensive BIND support services, please visit https://www.isc.org/support/.