June 2026 release marks the End of Life for BIND 9.18

Per our longstanding release plan for BIND 9, after four and a half years, BIND 9.18 maintenance will end with our June release, planned for June 17th.

The time has come to upgrade

Users who want to maintain a secure BIND deployment are strongly urged to migrate to BIND 9.20 as soon as possible. BIND 9.20 is ESV-quality now, and the risk of unexpected changes due to upgrading is much lower than the risk of running an unmaintained version. We are still working on a significant backlog of security bugs, many of which were discovered through LLM analysis and we expect several more months of maintenance releases full of security patches. Therefore, we urge you to upgrade to our supported 9.20 version as soon as you can, and not to delay for long.

Useful resources to consult about upgrading to 9.20

We recommend consulting this knowledgebase article on BIND 9.20 Significant Changes for an overview of the most noticeable changes between 9.18 and 9.20. (More details are available in the release notes, of course.) We have published several blogs assessing the relative performance of 9.20 vs 9.18, one each on authoritative and recursive applications. We also have published Known Issues lists of select bugs for 9.18 and for 9.20.

“bind-esv” repositories will soon contain BIND 9.20

A few weeks after our last release of BIND 9.18, and a week before we post the July maintenance release of BIND 9.20, we plan to update our package repositories labelled “bind-esv”. We will replace the 9.18 version there with the current version of 9.20. Then, when we do our July maintenance release, planned for July 22nd, we will update both the “bind” and “bind-esv” repositories with the next maintenance version of BIND 9.20.

We did consider whether replacing the version in the “bind-esv” repositories might cause some users to upgrade by accident. The argument in favor of replacing it was clear: after we stop releasing maintenance versions, BIND 9.18 versions will be vulnerable to numerous unpatched defects, many of which will be exposed by patching and releasing BIND 9.20. Therefore, we feel it is more responsible to force users to update to a supported version, than to keep a vulnerable version in the repository.

Summary