DNSRD Books Documents Servers Tools Training About

DNS Resources Directory


About the DNS

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a distributed internet directory service. DNS is used mostly to translate between domain names and IP addresses, and to control email delivery. Most internet services rely on DNS to work. If DNS fails or is too slow, web sites cannot be located and email delivery stalls.

A selection of overview documents explains DNS from a high-level perspective, while the RFC documents are the official standards.

News

  • BIND 9.3.5 was released in April 2008, 9.5.0 in May 2008, and 9.4.2 in December 2007. It's worth moving any older BIND installations across to at least 9.3.5. 09-Jun-2008
  • DNS is 25 years old this year. See RFC 881 for Jon Postel's original plan. (According to Paul V. Mockapetris, the 88x RFCs were written after experience with a prototype implementation in 1983.) 01-Feb-2008
  • Net::DNS 0.60, a widely used Perl module for DNS lookups, was released on 22-Jun-2007. This fixes input validation errors that could result in remotely exploitable denial of service. 03-Jul-2007
  • Microsoft DNS Server is vulnerable to a serious remote attack via RPC, which allows arbitrary code to be run on the system. This affects DNS server running on Windows 2000 Server SP4 and Windows 2003 Server SP1/SP2. Microsoft released patch MS07-029 for this vulnerability on 08-May-2007. Two workarounds also exist: block requests to the DNS server on TCP ports 139, 145, as well as 1024 and upwards, or disable the "remote management over RPC" feature. 14-Jun-2007

Contents

General
What is DNS?
DNS books
Where to find DNS training
About DNSRD
DNS Standards
DNS-related RFCs
Current DNS standards activity
Software
DNS server software
Tools (Unix and cross-platform)
Windows Tools
DNS programming
Online info
Assorted documents
DNSRD tips
DNS resource record types
FAQ and BIND FAQ
Newsgroups
Mailing lists
Names, registration, root servers
DNS registration
Top-level domain names
Domain name disputes
Root server hints file (MD5) (PGP)
Name server statistics

Other DNS Resources


Thanks to everyone who has contributed to DNSRD. Comments are always welcome.
Copyright 1994-2008 by András Salamon <andras@dns.net>