Bind on MAC OS X

[Marc Majka]

Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" includes named from BIND 9.2.2.  You can get  
the original BIND sources from ISC (http://www.isc.org/), or you can  
get the source as used in Mac OS X from http:// 
darwinsource.opendarwin.org/10.4.2/bind9-11/.

While the DNS server (/usr/sbin/named) comes pretty well straight out  
of the box from the BIND sources, it is worthwhile noting that Mac OS  
X has a lot more than just the BIND resolver involved on the client  
side of host name/address resolution.  APIs like gethostbyname(),  
gethostbyaddr(), getaddrinfo(), and so on are actually handled behind  
the main system library by a daemon that can search multiple  
information services to resolve name or address queries.  The daemon  
- named lookupd - can search /etc/hosts, NIS, DNS, NetInfo, and  
potentially other services.  It also maintains a cache for better  
system performance.  See the lookupd(8) man page for details.

Mac OS X also supports multiple DNS client resolvers.  Think of this  
as having many different versions of /etc/resolv.conf files.  A  
routing strategy uses one or more of these configurations depending  
on the name (or address) in any given query.  See the resolver(5) man  
page for details.  This dovetails with Apple's "Bonjour" system,  
which includes support for multicast DNS.  Bonjour is more widely  
known for its role in plug-and-play / zero configuration networking  
and service discovery, but it turns out that every Mac OS X system  
runs a multicast DNS responder which allows every host to reply to  
multicast DNS queries for its own name or address - as well as a lot  
of other useful information.

--
Marc Majka


On 6 Oct, 2005, at 14:19, Joel Perez wrote:

> Hey Guys,
>
> Im pretty much a BIND newb, but im reading and learning as I go along.
>
> Here is my situation.
> We used to have 2 DNS servers running on Sun OS, the suits decided  
> they
> wanted to use MAC OS x instead so I moved everything over and for the
> most part its working good.
>
> Can anyone here point me to any sources that can help me out in  
> getting
> familiar with BIND on MAC os x?
>
> Bind version is 9.2
>
> Thanks,
>
> --------------------------------------------
> Joel Perez    |  Network Engineer
> 305.914.3412  |  Ntera
> --------------------------------------------
>
>
>
>