Do any of you still have a copy of Paul Vixie's message on bind-4.9.6 being safe along with bind-8.1.1?

here's an oblique reference, the only one i can find in my nanog archives. To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: BIND & root servers In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 17 Jul 1997 12:25:49 EDT." <Pine.LNX.3.96.970717121554.26658A-100000@snappy.wserv.com> Date: Thu, 17 Jul 1997 11:47:08 -0700 From: Paul A Vixie <vixie@wisdom.rc.vix.com> Hello. Welcome to BIND-NANOG, the mailing list where North American BIND problems (rather than BIND problems in general) are discussed among network operators. If you would prefer to just discuss general network operations issues, sorry, there is no such mailing list. If you would prefer to just discuss BIND problems, see usenet:comp.protocols.dns.bind. Now for our topic:

With the root servers blowing up, someone down here told me that our BIND 8.1 server was looking up less names than other servers. Of course I denied it, but he coaxed me into running a few tests.

I tested 3 servers, a BIND 8.1 server, a BIND 4.9.5 p1 server, a BIND 4.9.5 server, and a BIND 4.9.3 server.

I tested a total of 100 uncached domains.

16% of the domains couldn't be looked up by the BIND 4.9.3 server 16% of the domains couldn't be looked up by the BIND 4.9.5p1 server 17% of the domains couldn't be looked up by the BIND 4.9.5 server 26% of the domains couldn't be looked up by the BIND 8.1 server

All queries were sent to all the nameservers at the same time. I'm not sure if this is by chance, but it seems that BIND 8.1 isn't doing as good a job as the older 4.9.x servers.

Can anyone confirm this?

Without knowing exactly what test you ran, I suspect that noone will be able to confirm it. However, I can say that BIND-8.1.1 is less promiscuous than its predecessors, and so it is likely to actually reflect underlying origin server problems more directly than its predecessors. (This is part of the cost of preventing AlterNIC, et al, from polluting your cache.) If you would also run your test (whatever it is) against BIND-4.9.6 I suspect that the results will be similar to BIND-8.1.1 (which it's not clear that you used; BIND-8.1 has already been deprecated by its first patch release.) We now return you to NANOG-FIBRE, wherein the world wide fibre situation and its possible effects on North American network operations are discussed hourly.