IP Communications

Internet Systems Consortium, (ISC) Inc., a provider of Internet infrastructure software, has released version 9.5 of BIND, its industry standard Domain Name System (DNS) software.

 

BIND 9.5, according to ISC, provides several internal processing improvements and feature additions, including an optional XML-based statistics channel and interoperability with Active Directory.

 

ISC claims that its BIND software, which is equipped with a server, a caching resolver and support tools, is the “most complete” reference implementation of the DNS protocol. The DNS technology is used to convert recognizable or human-readable names such as Web site domain names and email addresses to computer network addresses.

 

The latest version of Bind has enhanced the internal housekeeping tasks related to caching resolvers, with improvements in speed and responsiveness for servers that serve a large number of client machines or have a large DNS cache, according to company’s officials.

 

In addition, this new release also provides support for DNS within Active Directory, and also implements the GSS-TSIG authentication mechanism used with DNS dynamic update in Microsoft (News - Alert) Active Directory.

 

Officials said that BIND 9.5 makes fallback from EDNS—required for digitally signed DNS answers using DNSSEC—to plain DNS visible and can help identify broken servers, firewalls, and networks.

 

Additionally, officials said that BIND 9.5 runs on various UNIX platforms and Windows 2000/XP/2003 binaries are available, and features DNSSEC for assuring the authenticity of DNS data, IPv6 capabilities and Dynamic DNS support.

 

“The new statistics feature provides basic data about the health of a BIND 9 server and is intended for DNS administrators to access,” said Joao Damas, product manager for BIND at ISC.

 

He also said that the data is available in XML and the company looks forward to the community creating tools and monitoring applications to take advantage of and enhance this feature.

 

“What is available today was based upon requests from the BIND user bases and ISC Forum members,” he said.

 

 

 

BIND 9.5 is available for download from Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. (ISC) at http://www.isc.org/sw/bind/, and according to the company it is is available at no charge under a non-restrictive BSD license.