BIND 9.4.2-P2-W1 stops responding

[Dan Mahoney, System Admin]

On Tue, 9 Sep 2008, Mark Andrews wrote:

>> Yeah aint that a nice kickinthepants... Sorry no new bind for yous if
>> you arent made of moneybags and running the latest windoze!  Guess we
>> will start looking at djbdns, it didnt have the bugs in the first
>> place. Or switch back to windozedns.. oh no.. did I say that??
>
>> disgruntled_used_to_be_bind_user
>
> 	Firstly I don't call XP or W2K3 the lastest versions by any
> 	measure.   There were some fixes that we would have liked
> 	to have applied that required Vista or later.  Now that
> 	change would have been forcing you to go to the latest
> 	Windows versions.  Instead we found a sub-optimal workaround.
> 	We just wern't able to find a workaround for this issue and
> 	we looked.
>
> 	If you are worried about money there are lots of free OS's
> 	available which will run on your existing hardware which we
> 	do support.

I would say for smaller operations, the problem can be when you have "the 
windows server" which is also configured as your DNS server (and often, is 
also possibly your AD server.  But because of the functions of that 
server and its ip, you cannot just supplant the whole machine.  Nor can 
you easily shift everyone overnight to use a new DNS server.

In this situation, the better thought might be to run your BIND server on 
some other OS -- Linux or BSD are both wonderful possibilities, and if you 
need to click stuff to administer is, webmin is wonderful -- and have the 
DNS server on your windows machine forward all its queries to that, which 
should serve to somewhat-effectively isolate you from this issue.

As for Windows 2000 being dead, MS has not completely abandoned it, and in 
fact there are even some cases where they will still provide new licenses 
for it (such as schools with donated hardware) -- there SHOULD BE a 
supported fix from Microsoft, but 2k is in "extended support" right now -- 
which means to get anything but the barest of updates (even so much as a 
daylight savings time fix) you gotta pay.  And mostly through the nose.

Heck, even a DSL (Damned Small Linux) instance can run under a windows 
machine and run your BIND code.

Hope any of these may help you,

-Dan

-- 

--------Dan Mahoney--------
Techie,  Sysadmin,  WebGeek
Gushi on efnet/undernet IRC
ICQ: 13735144   AIM: LarpGM
Site:  http://www.gushi.org
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