DNS and BIND

[CIS BDLM Ms KAREH]

How can I confirm that the current HP-UX (10.20 and 11.0) named server is conformant with BIND 8.2.2 ?

Thank you.

[CHRIS_ANORUO]

The 8.2 versions of bind are not available from HP for HPUX. If you want it you will need to port it yourself (unfortunately it's NOT currently available from the HPUX porting center http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/ ). For a complete discussion of what is happening with bind see http://my1.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x3a647e990647d4118fee0090279cd0f9
and also this previous thread:
http://my1.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0xf8938d77ef20d411b66300108302854d,00.html

[Shannon Petry]

named (bind) also has a nice built in... Run
/usr/sbin/named -version
and it will print it's version. Too bad this simple switch is not built into more programs....

If your really going to look at 8.2.X though, make sure you are running at least patch level 5. Prior has many security flaws.

Better yet, Bind 9 is completely multi-threaded and very nice. If you are going to get the unauthorized version, and your server is busy V9 is your best bet!

Regards,
Shannon

[Juan González]

There is no depot for BIND 8.2 from HP but the port exists, you must compile it. You can download the source from www.isc.org (Internet Software Consortium). You will need an ansi C compiler as gcc, flex, yacc and GNU make (gmake); you can get them in the Software Porting And Archive Centre for HP-UX (http://hpux.cae.wisc.edu)
Then follow the compilation instructions and voila...

Best regards
Juan Gonz?lez

[rick jones]

Downloading and compiled the BIND bits from www.isc.org is very straightforward. I've done it several times in the course of my DNS server perf work (ftp://ftp.cup.hp.com/dist/networking/briefs/). With the HP compiler it is pretty much a snap.

Keep in mind though that while you can then run the named from that distribution, unless you take other action (such as relinking), the resolver routines used by apps will be the one provided by the OS.

Also, while BIND 9 is multi-threaded, I've found that a single threaded BIND 8 can serve a very high request rate, and on a UP system BIND 8 is probably faster. The last measurements I took of BIND 9 though were of a BETA, where I got results slower than 8 on a caching-only server test.