bind 8.2.4: limiting used memory?

[D. J. Bernstein]

Michael Kjorling writes:
> Somehow it drifted over to BIND vs. djbdns

When Knowles posts misinformation about djbdns, I correct his errors in
the same forum. It's not my fault that he keeps doing it here.

> I am sure there are some occassions when djbdns, dnscache etc. are
> doing better than BIND.

Those occasions being ``new domains'' and ``upgraded domains.'' The
alpha dnscache release was in December 1999; the 1.00 release was in
March 2000; djbdns now handles millions of second-level domains.

The main reason that BIND is so common is that it was, for many years,
the only server available. BIND 4 is much more common than BIND 9!

> 95% (was it Brad Knowles who cited that number?)

Yes, it was Brad Knowles who invented that number. For more of his
favorite fabrications, see http://cr.yp.to/surveys/sendmail.html.

> I followed the installation instructions for qmail 1.03

Obviously not. The situation you described wouldn't have happened if you
had run config or config-fast, as the instructions told you to do.

I realize that the qmail installation instructions take several minutes
to read. The djbdns (and forthcoming qmail 2) installation instructions
are much shorter.

> I don't remember qmail doing that, but I remember being annoyed at the
> extremely limited Received: header information it provided

More evidence that you didn't follow the installation instructions. The
function of tcp-env in inetd.conf is to supply all that information to
qmail-smtpd.

One of the reasons that djbdns's installation is so streamlined is that
the new tools it relies upon---supervise, tcpserver, etc.---are much
better suited for automation than boot scripts, inetd.conf, etc.

> And of course I can get in touch with Nominum - the people who are
> actually _writing_ and _maintaining_ BIND, and purchase a support
> contract that fits my needs for the moment. 

Right. Nominum can devote its resources to this continuing source of
income, instead of making BIND easier to use. Meanwhile, I'll focus on
making sure that my users don't need support contracts.

---Dan