BIND usage statistics

[Kevin Darcy]

Ahmad, Hash S wrote:

> Dear all
>
> I am in the middle of an evaluation of BIND but would like to know more about its coverage across the Internet. Does anyone have or know of where I may find deployment statistics? You know the sort of stuff I mean - proportions of Internet DNS servers running BIND4/8/9 - which is the most widely used etc.

I'm not sure how one would go about gathering such statistics. Older BIND's don't support the VERSION.BIND hack, and even those that do are sometimes configured to return bogus information. I suppose one could catalog various protocol quirks and eccentricities of various nameserver implementations/versions,
and then tickle them the right way to bring those quirks and eccentricities out, thus revealing what implementation/version is running where. But this would be heuristic at best, and who has time for such a thing?

My *guess* would be that the vast majority of Internet DNS servers run BIND 8 or something based on BIND 8 code. After that, probably the largest numbers are running non-BIND-derived nameservers. After that, buggy, insecure BIND 4. No-one should be running BIND 9 in production since it's only a first beta
and is heavily disclaimed against production use.

                                                                                                                                    - Kevin