ULTRIX 3.0 (has bind 4.7)

[Craig Partridge]

Reply-to: craig at BBN.COM (Craig Partridge)



> It's got an obsolete version of BIND (4.7something) with "DEC enhancements"...
> kinda scary if you think about it. Who knows though... maybe the enhancements 
> are fixes for whatever it was that made everyone eschew 4.7.
> 
> I checked the man page for gethostent, and they're still using the
> old-style hostent structure in netdb.h that has the single dimensional
> h_addr... I wonder how their sendmail handles MX records? (hmmm... I wish
> I was in my office where the manuals are... I wonder IF it handles MX
> records...)

Well that's certainly disturbing.

Bind 4.7 is dead -- in fact, it was never an official release according
to the Berkeley document.

People should get bind 4.8.  I append the general comments from the 4.8
CHANGES file to give you some sense of why.  The robustness checking and
negative caching issues are key -- there's a real move on to turn on
negative caching, and anyone who isn't running 4.8 or better is likely to
get flamed when that happens.

As for old-style hostent structures, my view is that there is no
excuse for that (but then again, I was the guy who pushed Berkeley
into developing the new hostent structure in 1985/6 so I'm biased).

Craig Partridge

(from the bind 4.8 distribution -- dated April 6, 1988)

Welcome to version 4.8 of bind.

There have been several changes to the named boot file (/etc/named.boot)
of which you should be aware.  The "domain" line for each zone is no longer
needed, but one such line may still be used to specify a default domain
to be used for queries containing names with only a single component.
The term "suffixes", which was added in version 4.7alpha, has been removed.

The manual page on named (named.8) has been updated to reflect all
these changes.  Please read this and look at the example files
before installation.  You should also note the changes in the
resolver code to support non-fully-qualified addresses and per-user
host aliases.  See hostname(7) for an overview.  Two new routines
have been added to the resolver library since the last test release:
res_query formulates a query, sends it, waits for a response and does
preliminary error checking; res_search implements the search rules
of gethostbyname using res_query.

The MX lookup routine in sendmail has been modified to use res_search.  
Also, dn_skip takes an additional parameter and has been renamed
to dn_skipname.  While old sendmail binaries will work with the new
version of bind, because of these changes, it is desirable to install
new sendmail sources and recompile sendmail.  Do not rebuild sendmail 
from old sources.   The new sendmail is on ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU for
anonymous FTP from pub/4.3/sendmail.MX.tar and pub/4.3/sendmail.MX.tar.Z.

There have been numerous changes to named, fixing most of the known
bugs that can be fixed without major structural changes in the server.
Several server configurations that failed before should now work.
Certain robustness problems have been fixed, in particular bounds-
checking when processing incoming packets.  Two changes have been made
in preparation for negative caching: SOA records are sent in the authority
section in negative responses with NXDOMAIN set, and a bug was fixed that
caused confusion and repeated requests if a response had no error, no answer
and an SOA in the authority section.  As such responses are already sent
by other servers, and will be sent by the next release of BIND, it is
important that all sites upgrade to this version as quickly as possible.

The root "hint" cache and cache file remain the largest problem area,
along with named's naivete in accepting bogus server's data.
These will be addressed in the next release, along with asynchronous
zone transfers, intelligent reloading of zone files, faster startup,
and caching of negative responses.

This version (4.8) will replace the last officially released version (4.5).
Version 4.5 has a serious bug that causes the generation of a continuous
stream of bogons to the root domain servers (bogus queries with the query
response bit set and possibly garbage for nsid and rcode).  It is imperative
that these versions of named be replaced as fast as possible.  We urge you to
field 4.8 quickly, for the sake of the root domain servers.

	Mike Karels
	Jean Wood
	bind at ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU