BIND9 v BIND 8 (was Re: 8.3 vs 8.4)

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "Mark" == Mark  <admin at asarian-host.net> writes:

    >> My "arrogant presumption" is the truth for most DNS sites. Few
    >> people know or care about the query rates their name servers
    >> get or the size of the server's memory/VM footprint.

    Mark> The former? Probably, yes. The latter? I think not.

Think again.

    Mark> I got tired of experimenting with something new, whereas the 
    Mark> old was working fine. See, the question is not whether I have
    Mark> objections to running a program, twice the memory size of
    Mark> the old, but whether I have good reasons to move to the new
    Mark> version.

Well I gave plenty of good reasons for moving to BIND9 already. If
these don't matter to you, that's your choice. BTW, you seem to be
insinuating that BIND9 is only good for experiments. That's absurd.

    >> BTW, the CHANGES file for the current BIND8 and BIND9 releases
    >> are about the same size, not that this is a metric of code
    >> quality.

    Mark> But they are a good measure of its stability. A high
    Mark> frequency of fixes/patches in a relative short time-span,
    Mark> tells you, statistically, that it is unlikely that, come
    Mark> tomorrow, all of a sudden everything is fixed.

These are naive and misguided assumptions. However if you choose to
believe them, you're free to do so. FYI, BIND9 is more "fixed" than
BIND8 will ever be. There are so many things BIND8 gets wrong and
can't be fixed without a ground-up redesign and rewrite. That's why we
have BIND9. It *is* that complete redesign and rewrite, albeit one
that was constrained by the need for backwards compatibility in the
format of zone and config files.

    Mark> And I only need to skim over the subject headers on this
    Mark> list, to see that people are still having trouble with BIND9. 

Well, you're simply wrong about this. You're even more wrong to jump
to conclusions when you've admitted to only "skim over the subject
headers". A cursory and half-hearted examination of something can
prove anything or confirm an irrational prejudice. Most of the people
who post here have problems with DNS or BIND, not BIND9. Of course
posters have had problems migrating to BIND9. But these problems are
usually not BIND9's fault. They've generally been caused by DNS
administrator error: for instance zone files that have been illegal or
broken delegations that BIND8 has allowed for years. Or the poster
hasn't read the BIND9 FAQ and migration notes. Or they're running an
old release instead of the current once.