BIND - how predominant?

[Kelsey Cummings]

Well, I found that NT DNS was pathetically slow, and didn't appear to every
use a cache.  That was with about 100 zones for websites and about  300
dial-up users.  Same hardware running bind gives much better performance.
To be honest, NT DNS was very stable thought.

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Kelsey Cummings
System Administrator
NetEase, Inc.
kc at neteze.com
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----- Original Message -----
From: Cedric Puddy <cedric at itactics.itactics.com>
To: Walt <walt at web-3.com>
Cc: Michael Milligan <milli at acmebw.com>;
<comp-protocols-dns-bind at uunet.uu.net>
Sent: Thursday, September 09, 1999 6:20 PM
Subject: Re: BIND - how predominant?


> 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
>
> -
> |  CCj/ClearLine - Unix/NT Administration and TCP/IP Network Services
> |  118 Louisa Street, Kitchener, Ontario, N2H 5M3, 519-741-2157
> \____________________________________________________________________
>    Cedric Puddy, IS Director cedric at thinkers.org
>      PGP Key Available at: http://www.thinkers.org/cedric
>
>