Favorite DNS?

[Nicholas Leippe]

On Friday 27 July 2007, Michael L Torrie wrote:
> No, not really.  It's more concise, in terms of characters, but it's not
> more clear to the end user.  It still requires that you understand how
> to parse the line.  So it's certainly not worse.  But not better either.

Yes, it's different. If you are familiar with djbdns, then it makes absolute, 
perfect sense at a glance. I think conciseness can often make things more 
clear.

>  It's also not in standard BIND format, which is often used to read
> zones into other DNS programs (IE everyone should understand BIND zone
> format; not everyone will understand DJB zone format).
>
> What bugs me about djbdns is that he bills it as a BIND replacement.  If
> it was a BIND replacement, it should be able to natively read BIND zone
> files.  Oh well.

There are tradeoffs, as with everything.

There are tools to convert native BIND format zone files to djbdns data files.
Djbdns data files are compiled into a .db, which makes loading it extremely 
fast--it can start serving records immediately.  Compare that to BIND which 
can take quite a while to load up several thousand records before it can 
begin serving. Also, the compilation process checks the format validity, 
rather than just having a nameserver serving weird stuff, or trying to load 
up 999/1000 files and breaking on the last one, meanwhile you have no active 
service.

As far as being a 'BIND replacement', I guess it depends on how you define 
what you're replacing.  There's the protocol interface of DNS, which it 
absolutely replaces, and then there's the administration interface. It can be 
a drop-in replacement if you simply run the conversion scripts to generate 
the data file, but it doesn't have the exact same controls and switches as 
BIND. So, in that regard you can say that it isn't.