BIND - how predominant?

[Cedric Puddy]

On Wed, 8 Sep 1999, Walt wrote:

> >Walt <walt at web-3.com> wrote in message
> >news:4.1.19990827214759.00b50100 at mail.t6.net...
> > > I was running Bind... but now I run DNS on Microsoft.  It is rock solid.
> > > The graphical interface and remote administration make it easy to
> >administer.
> > >
> >
> >And how many zones do you have?  1 with 10 records?  :-)
> 
> I fail to see the need for the snide remark....!  However, to answer your 
> question,  I have about 40 zones pointing to about 90 IP addresses.   I run 
> a primary with two secondaries.
> 
> Has your experience been less that good?  How did you configure it?  What 
> version of NT? How long ago?
> 
> I know that NT DNS had a well deserved bad rap.  In my estimation, that is 
> no longer true. If you have evidence to the contrary, I'd be happy to hear it.
> 
> Thanks....
> 
> Walt

I've personally had a number of bad experiences with
the MS-BIND product.  In particular, I've had it repeatedly
crash & refuse to start again due to being "unable to
map endpoints".  The solution that microsoft _recommended_
was blow away the whole service, remove registry
entries by hand, then reinstall, and add my zones back
in.  This sometimes worked, sometimes not.  

This is particularly bad, becuase these machines
were often not my machines, but customer machines.

We are talking about NT4.0, SP3 & SP5.  We are
talking about "withing the past 6 months", and
"over the past year and a half". :)

My solution in one instance was to install a linux
box on a nearby 486, put BIND 4.9.7 or so on it,
and show their tech how to use PICO to edit his
forward and reverse zones....  Later, we installed
BIND for NT (v 4.9.7) on another machine as a
secondary, and it's also worked fine.
(They also needed a cheap firewall.)

In general, I've found that BIND for NT 4.9.7
has been stable and quite usuable.  I don't
know about performance -- I rarely do anything
with a DNS server that would expose a real
performance bottleneck.

I also had tremendous difficulty getting MS-DNS to forward
requests properly, and I never did manage to figure
out why.  (After all, forwarding has never exactly
been rocket science..., or at least, has never supposed
to have been...)

On the topic of interfaces, I found the GUI that they
put on top of MS-DNS quite confusing - not to my personal
taste at all.  I found manipulating the files by hand
very easy to do, and very easy to script and automate.
These days, I do very little hand editing, because
I've integrated scripts into the structure I use for managing
systems.  The fact that doing that was simple to do
is largely related to the fact that there is by
default no GUI on top of BIND, IMHO.  Besides, if you
want a gui for BIND, I understand that there are
quite a number of tools for managing the zones and
such anyway.

Given the extreme cost of getting a human to do tech
support on a microsoft product, the general draconian
nature of the solutions that are often proposed
(the words "reinstall the _______" come to mind),
and the availability of BIND for NT (even if
[correct me if I'm wrong] BIND 8.x is not yet
available for NT), and the degree of support one
can get on BIND proper, I definately prefer to 
use BIND on NT Vs. MS-DNS.

There has been discussion about WINS & MS-DNS &
MS-DHCP integration, but I've not found that
it ultimately is that big an issue.

Also, speaking of MS-DNS, and Win2K, is there any
chance that BIND is going to be able to match
the Win2K signature protocol (I forget what's
called)?

-Cedric

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