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.