Blogs

BIND 9.12.0 is ready for Alpha testing. We made some significant changes in this release.  There are more changes that will be merged between alpha and beta, but we prioritized the biggest changes for the alpha, to maximize test coverage for them. Please help us test this release, and as usual send bug or test reports to bind9-bugs@isc.org. Please note

There has been much debate on various technical mailing lists about what the default prefix size should be for DHCPv6 prefix delegation. This post is not about what the prefix size should be, but about how you enable your DHCP server to provide an appropriate length prefix based on a ‘hint’ from the client. BACKGROUND The DHCPv6 protocol (including RFC 3315bis)

Kea is a flexible open source DHCP server that is becoming popular among system administrators. One of the most frequent feature requests was for an API for administrative tasks such as retrieving statistics, managing configuration and certain run time aspects, like leases. Some of the functionality was there, but there was no way to communicate with Kea. At the same

ISC Performance Lab We have been monitoring BIND9 performance using the ISC Performance Lab, described in this 2016 Blog post.  We realized we really needed something like this when users reported to us a significant performance drop when upgrading from version 9.9.5 to either 9.9.6 or 9.10.0.  We now review performance changes every month and when we see a negative

ISC DHCP Updated Updates to both supported branches of ISC DHCP are available now from our downloads page.  For this release, we focused specifically on updating the DHC client software, although there are many server updates as well.  We had a lot of help with this release, specifically from our open source packagers and OEM users.   While we haven’t

New maintenance versions of each of our supported branches are available from our downloads page.  We have also updated our 9.9 and 9.10-based Stable Preview releases; both are available to eligible support subscribers through your support queue. We issue BIND maintenance versions approximately every 6 months. Preview of BIND 9.12 Our next planned BIND release will be a new feature branch, BIND 9.12, currently

ISC’s open source, including BIND, ISC DHCP and Kea, is sustained by software support contracts. Open source software is free for the user, but developing it does cost money.  Our software systems are large and complex: the developers are doing a professional job like any other software development job.  Most of the money to support these projects comes from revenues from software

There are three reasons why you want a root server near you: Performance (faster response time) Resilience (less affected by global infrastructure problems) Privacy (less opportunity for eavesdropping) Introduction In the early days of the internet, most international traffic passed through the USA. Traffic between two nodes in Japan that didn’t use the same ISP was often routed through San Francisco.

We have decided to move ISC DHCP to the Mozilla Public License (MPL 2.0). In 2016 we re-licensed BIND and Kea under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.  At the time we solicited public comment, and talked to many stakeholders about it. In the end, we didn’t see any negative impact on our users from that change.  Now we plan to make the same shift from

Over the past five years, we have taken on average, 32 days to publicly disclose a BIND vulnerability, from the time we receive the first report.   Typical steps from report to disclosure include: Set-up secure email link with reporter, request more details Reproduce in house (this can take a while, particularly if the reporter can’t provide enough detail) Team

Update: to access the bug database, go to bugs.isc.org, click on the Guest login, and select “bug-list” for either DHCP or BIND9. We are excited to announce that, beginning July 7th, we will finally be enabling read-only Guest access to our BIND and DHCP bug database. I know what you are thinking. Every other open source project has had an

One of the major challenges with logging network traffic is that it is very disk I/O intensive. It can also require a lot of storage. The storage requirements often lead to the use of file compression algorithms such as gzip to reduce the amount of disk space needed. For DNS traffic this can typically result in an 80% reduction in