[79519] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: djbdns: An alternative to BIND
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (sthaug@nethelp.no)
Sat Apr 9 03:30:05 2005
To: nanog@merit.edu
From: sthaug@nethelp.no
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 9 Apr 2005 07:33:33 +0530"
Date: Sat, 09 Apr 2005 09:29:36 +0200
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
> > > I had a play with DJBDNS after using BIND for years. Here's why I
> > > switched back:
> > > - No AXFR support
> > It supports this.
>
> No IXFR, no automatic notification of bind slaves (you get to run a
> separate notify script) ...
>
> But yes, it is far easier to use, consumes very low amounts of memory
> and makes an excellent local resolver cache e&oe no roundrobin DNS
> without a patch (as in it returns all the A records in the same order
> every time, whereas bind does this in a different order ...)
A contrary view from the trenches:
Around a year ago we tested DJB dnscache as the recursive DNS server
in a high-volume ISP environment - mostly because we were not happy
with BIND 9 performance at the time. Our conclusions were:
- dnscache used *more* CPU than BIND 9 in our environment, effectively
ruling it out
- Not possible to get dnscache to listen to more than one IP address
unless you introduce hacks/patches
- Weird failures reported from users
- Annoying installation process with lots of small programs that we
don't want or need
We then used BIND 8 for a while, due to its better performance than
BIND 9. Earlier this year we finally found a BIND 9 configuration and
version that worked well for us (but still too low performance). We
finally switched to Nominum CNS (two servers) and one BIND 9 server
as backup. We really like Nominum CNS, and we're happy.
Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no
