Re: Appreciation for Bind patches

[Len Sassaman <rabbi () quickie net>]

On Sat, 20 Sep 2003, Andrew Fried wrote:

> I have been following the various threads relating to Verisign and wanted
> to make one comment that I feel has been missing.  Simply put, I would like
> to publicly express my appreciation to Mr. Vixie for taking the time to add
> the "root-delegation-only" patch for Bind.  I'm fairly new to NANOG, but
> I'm sure that others beside myself also feel a thank you is appropriate.

I have to second this. I started work on a bind8 patch for Anonymizer's
DNS servers after learning of the .com/.net change well before the news
that bind9 would have out of the box support for the features I needed.
This comes as a great relief, since there is now a supported and de facto
standard way of dealing with the Verisign breakage. I don't have to worry
about maintaining an in-house solution to this problem over version
changes, and I don't have to worry about possible unexpected behavior due
to errors on my part. This is probably the most responsive I have ever
seen any software "vendor" perform in providing a solution to someone
else's problem.

As a side effect of bind9's support for the "root-delegation-only"
feature, general performance of our systems have improved. (We upgraded
two of our caching name-servers from bind8 to bind9, and our proxy
response times have jumped by nearly a second in some cases.)

This certainly isn't a scientific benchmark of performance advantages for
bind9 over bind8, but I am finding myself having to ask the question "is
it time to retire bind8 entirely?" now.

Thanks again,

Len