BIND is composed of two parts. One is the user interface called the resolver which consists of a group of routines that reside in the C library /lib/libc.a. Second is the actual server called named. This is a daemon that runs in the background and services queries on a given network port. The standard port for UDP and TCP is specified in /etc/services.
When building your 4.3BSD system you may either build the C library to use the name server resolver routines or use the host table lookup routines to do host name and address resolution. The default resolver for 4.3BSD uses the name server. Newer BSD systems include both name server and host table functionality with preference given to the name server if there is one or if there is a /etc/resolv.conf file.
Building the C library to use the name server changes the way gethostbyname(3N), gethostbyaddr(3N), and sethostent(3N) do their functions. The name server renders gethostent(3N) obsolete, since it has no concept of a next line in the database. These library calls are built with the resolver routines needed to query the name server.
The resolver contains functions that build query packets and exchange them with name servers.
Before building the 4.3BSD C library, set the variable HOSTLOOKUP equal to named in /usr/src/lib/libc/Makefile. You then make and install the C library and compiler and then compile the rest of the 4.3BSD system. For more information see section 6.6 of ``Installing and Operating 4.3BSD on the VAX''.
If your operating system isn't VAX 4.3BSD, it is probably the case that your vendor has included resolver support in the supplied C Library. You should consult your vendor's documentation to find out what has to be done to enable resolver support. Note that your vendor's resolver may be out of date with respect to the one shipped with BIND, and that you might want to build BIND's resolver library and install it, and its include files, into your system's compile/link path so that your own network applications will be able to use the newer features.
The <bind-workers@vix.com> mailing list was once again of great help; this release would not be nearly as ready for prime time if not for their efforts. Special commendations are owed to Robert Elz, Don "Truck" Lewis, Bob Halley, Mark Andrews, Berthold Paffrath, Ruediger Volk, and Peter Koch.
Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett Packard, Silicon Graphics, and SunSoft all made hardware available for integration testing; this made the release far more solid than it would otherwise have been. More hardware loans are welcome -- if you are a system vendor and you would like BIND to run ``out of the box'' on your platform and are willing to lend some rusty old hardware for the purpose, please contact me (<paul@vix.org>) to make the arrangements.
Special thanks to the Internet Software Consortium for funding this work. Contact <isc-info@isc.org> if your organization would like to participate in funding future releases of BIND and other freely redistributable software packages that are in wide use on the Internet.
The alpha-test group was extremely helpful in furnishing improvements, finding and repairing bugs, and being patient. I would like to express special thanks to Brian Reid of Digital Equipment corporation for funding this work. Robert Elz, Alan Barrett, Paul Albitz, Bryan Beecher, Andrew Partan, Andy Cherenson, Tom Limoncelli, Berthold Paffrath, Fuat Baran, Anant Kumar, Art Harkin, Win Treese, Don Lewis, Christophe Wolfhugel, and a cast of dozens all helped out above and beyond the call of duty. Special thanks to Phil Almquist, who got the project started and contributed a lot of the code and fixed several of the worst bugs.
Many thanks to the users at U. C. Berkeley for falling into many of the holes involved with integrating BIND into the system so that others would be spared the trauma. I would also like to extend gratitude to Jim McGinness and Digital Equipment Corporation for permitting me to spend most of my time on this project.
Ralph Campbell, Doug Kingston, Craig Partridge, Smoot Carl-Mitchell, Mike Muuss and everyone else on the DARPA Internet who has contributed to the development of BIND. To the members of the original BIND project, Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle and Songnian Zhou.
Anne Hughes, Jim Bloom and Kirk McKusick and the many others who have reviewed this paper giving considerable advice.
This work was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DoD), Arpa Order No. 4871 monitored by the Naval Electronics Systems Command under contract No. N00039-84-C-0089. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Defense Research Projects Agency, of the US Government, or of Digital Equipment Corporation.
In Comm. A.C.M. 25, 4:260-274 April 1982.
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