Just saw an announcement for Dents ( http://www.dents.org/ ) on comp.os.linux.announce. This is supposedly a (future) replacement for BIND, as a DNS server. It has some cool ideas (dynamic zones, open storage interface, control interface, etc), but it looks like it's a work in progress.
let the record show that: 1. the authors attempted to contact me before their release, but i was out of town on a thanksgiving family holiday. they suggested that "some friendly competition" would be good for everybody, and i cannot argue with that! 2. bind 8.1.2++, now in preparation, will have a control interface (like ctlinnd) rather than signals. 3. bind 9.0, also now in preparation but not due 'til next year, will have dynamic zones, an open storage interface, and a lot of other stuff.
Has anyone looked at this? It seems like it could (theoretically) address several of the DNS issues that have been discussed here and on inet-access lately.
since bind is funded by ISP's, i can only imagine that it is also going to address most of the DNS issues that have been brought up here and elsewhere.
I'm not quite sure I understand why these features weren't just contributed to BIND, but maybe it is time for a fresh start...
perhaps the authors think ISC's source isn't "open" enough, or perhaps they didn't know that ISC was hiring DNS software engineers. or perhaps they just had some ideas they wanted to try out. (bind 9.0 is a fresh start, other than the configuration file parser and some of the underlying libraries.) coming, as it does, on the heels of a recent announcement from philips (.se) of a load balancing web proxying dns serving open source content server, it seems that folks everywhere at once are finding dns service an interesting area to work in. hopefully there will be a lot of code sharing, to the betterment of all. -- Paul Vixie <paul@vix.com>