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208

answers:

3

I'm working on migrating to Amazon EC2 for our servers and need to try out internal DNS options. I'm looking for the equivalent of Tomcat (a standard well know easy to use servlet container) in the DNS area. BIND is the only one I'm familiar with by name, but I'm wondering if there are other "better" options or if that's the one I should go with.

Our servers are currently running CentOS.

This will end up being a production environment so stable software is a requirement.

+2  A: 

BIND is the usual nameserver software that is used, but there is also djbdns and a few others.

I must also recommend the book DNS and BIND if you go the BIND route, it helped me a lot back in the day. I hope it's been updated since though, considering the more recent updates to BIND.

JeeBee
djbdns is an unmaintained individual project. No reason to use it. In the free software area, for authoritative name service, there is BIND, NSD and PowerDNS. It does not seem there is another serious program.
bortzmeyer
There are at least 4 maintained forks of djbdns and plenty of community support and patches for stock djbdns.As far as other BIND alternatives, what about MaraDNS?
Mark Johnson
+1  A: 

I'd recommend Bind, even though the syntax is a bit scary at first. I used this guide, when I was first learning Bind: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/DNS-HOWTO.html

There are other options, like PowerDNS and if you're working with a big environment you might want to consider LDAP for backend.

On CentOS, it's probably easiest to just use yum to install bind and then go through the guide above.

Andrioid
+1  A: 

I recommend BIND, because it's the best documented and most well understood, and NSD, because it's good and free.

In particular, NSD is only an authoritative name server, so doesn't have to carry the cruft that other servers that attempt to provide all of the different DNS functions have.

I seriously couldn't ever recommend djbdns - notwithstanding that it's now in the public domain, the author simply refuses to implement many parts of the standard DNS protocol (such as AXFR).

Alnitak
See http://homepages.tesco.net/J.deBoynePollard/FGA/djbdns-myths-dispelled.html - AXFR is implemented via axfrdns.
Mark Johnson
that page has so many errors in it that it's not funny :(
Alnitak