BIND Version

[Mathias Korber]

>   Hello. My name is Yu Kobayashi. I'm a graduate student at=20
> Hiroshima University. I'm currently an associate UNIX=20
> administrator in my laboratory.
>   One day our lab teacher told us, an administrator and=20
> myself, to check the version of BIND we're using right=20
> now. So I have checked most of the archives and tried to=20
> run the commands to see the BIND version. However, the=20
> commands like "dig", "in.named -version", "in.named -v"=20
> don't work at all. So I tried other ways.

Old versions of BIND do not understand the query for the version
(which by the way is
	$ dig @server version.binx chaos txt
), and mostly administrators of newer versions disable this
(using the 'version' option or some hack (defining a bind. zone
in tha chaos class), because showing others what versions of
BIND you are running is not a very good idea in the first place.

The best way to find out which version you are running yourself is
looking at the message BIND logsinto syslog on startu. So restart
BIND and look what it has written to your syslog.


>   Here is what I have tried so far:=20
>=20
> 1) pisces[5]# what in.named
> in.named:
>         db_dump.c 1.10 89/02/14 SMI
>         db_load.c 1.13 89/02/14 SMI
>         db_lookup.c 1.9 88/05/03 SMI
>         db_reload.c 1.12 88/05/03 SMI
>         db_save.c 1.9 88/05/03 SMI
>         db_update.c 1.9 89/02/14 SMI
>         ns_forw.c 1.15 94/06/16 SMI
>         ns_init.c 1.13 89/02/14 SMI
>          Copyright (c) 1986 Regents of the University of California.
>         ns_main.c 1.19 94/06/16 SMI
>         ns_maint.c 1.13 89/02/22 SMI
>         ns_req.c 1.14 89/02/14 SMI
>         ns_resp.c 1.18 89/02/14 SMI
>         ns_sort.c 1.9 89/02/22 SMI
>         version.c 1.5 88/05/03 SMI
>         strcasecmp.c 1.5 88/02/08 SMI
>=20
> O.K. I guess the version of BIND is very old, possibly=20
> older than 4.9.3. But what are those numbers like 1.10,=20
> 1.13, and so on? Are they important numbers to figure=20
> out the BIND version?

Those are the version numbers of each source file compiled into
BIND. You are right, this does look like quite an old version of BIND
potentially BIND-4.8.

You should defintely upgrade. If you can afford, upgrade to =
BIND-8.2.2-P7
(or BIND-9, though that is very new and still missed some features). You
will have to convert your named.boot file to named.conf (different =
syntax!)
if you were still on some version of BIND-4. There is a script called
namedbootconf.pl to help with that.

If you cannot do so for now, you should at least upgrade to BIND-4.9.7 =
immediately
and then take a good look at upgrading to BIND-8 soon after.

regards

>=20
> I have also tried this:
>=20
> 2) pisces[7]# strings in.named | less
> ......
> ......
> @(#)version.c 1.5 88/05/03 SMI
> SMI 4.1
> res_mkquery(%d, %s, %d, %d)
> %s.%s
> ......
> ......
>=20
> Here I saw the number 4.1, and our operating system is=20
> SunOS 4.1.4-JLE1.1.4. So I'm thinking that SMI 4.1 is=20
> related to the BIND version.=20
>=20
>   Here is a question. Is number 4.1 is the BIND version=20
> we are using, or is there a better way to figure out which=20
> version of BIND we are using?=20
>   By the way, nslookup didn't work, either...
>=20
>=20
> --=20
> *************************************
>  Yu Kobayashi
>  koba at isl.hiroshima-u.ac.jp
>  http://www.ann.hi-ho.ne.jp/y-kob/
> *************************************
>=20
>=20