DNS And BIND Book Reviews

Review by :

I’m the DNS administrator at a mid-size Internet Service Provider, and because we are an ISP, a lot of our day-to-day operations rely on the proper implementation of DNS. After all, as I found out today, we do primary DNS for approximately 1800 domains (yikes). The combination of everyday experience with DNS and the wealth of information – both theoretical and practical – that I got from this book has done so much for my understanding of DNS and of the Internet as a whole. The book begins with the basics of building a nameserver, but I know that if I have a specific question, I can use it as a reference book as well. It’s also written in a straightforward, accessible manner. The only constructive criticism I can offer is that I wish it had more information about managing many domains (not just subdomains). That’s still not enough to lower my overall rating to four starts from five. If you have to get one book on DNS, get this one – it will more than suffice. I look forward to the next edition covering BIND 8.x. Excellent job, O’Reilly, Paul Albitz, and Cricket Liu!

Review by Jon R. Kibler:

Changing from a pre-8 version of BIND to version 8 of BIND is not as straightforward as previous upgrades have been. Then `named.boot’ file is entirely different, among other changes. This book is great at identifying the required changes and assisting in making those changes.DNS and BIND clarifies all the mysteries associated with BIND (named) and DNS. Easy to read. Covers every detail from getting and installing the latest BIND, to configuration and troubleshooting. Has a great chapter on nslookup and another that gives detailed explanations of just about every BIND related error message. The only thing they left out is info on configuring syslog to manipulate in a usable manner the BIND generated messages.For some reason, DNS seems to be a mystery to so many sysadmins. If it were as simple as people often pretend it is (typical system admin person: “Oh, I already know everything about DNS that I need to know… so why read a book or take a course?”), then why do I see 15,000+ lame server messages and 250+ mail CNAME messages every month? These errors are only the result of DNS configuration errors!Very few sysadmin people REALLY know as much about BIND and DNS as they should. If you are a sysadmin person, do yourself a favor and buy and read this book. If you are an IT manager, check your system administrator’s book shelf. If this book is missing, then buy it for them and make them read it! (You should read it first, then develop some test questions to see if they really did read it!)This BOOK MUST BE REQUIRED READING for EVERY system administrator on any type of system connected to the Internet. If everyone that administered an Internet site read this book, we could probably reduce the error traffic on the Internet by 50% or more!This book also should be the basis of a required one-quarter undergraduate CS course at all schools that teach CS, CE, IT, or equivalent.One of the best written of the O’Reilly books.Jon R. Kibler, Systems Architect, Advanced Systems Engineering Technology, Inc.

Review by Ingvar Hagelund:

I found this book concice and clear, and much easier to understand than the classic “DNS and BIND” from O’Reilley. Specially, I found the fast steps onto a working DNS server clear and right to the point. I also enjoyed get a working secure dynamic DNS setup over a insecure network. Humor between the lines makes the book a good read. I’ll have this book in my front bookshelf for a long time. It’s great, both as a howto and for reference. Getting the BIND manpage printed on paper is a nice bonus as well. Mr. Langfeldt, you rule!Ingvar

Review by :

I liked this book. It covers interesting and relevant fields (DDNS, security concerns, how to interface with DNS from different languages, …) in addition to the basics, in enough depth to be really useful. It is practical and down-to-earth, with thorough examples, explaining how things work and why. It definitely helped me grok the ideas and concepts behind DNS.

Review by :

This book has turned out to be the best investment I’ve made so far in my 20 year IT career. I’ve always trusted O’Reilly books for their detailed accuracy. However, for the task at hand, I didn’t need a book to explain WHY things work… I needed one to tell me how to GET them to work. This book was perfect! It doesn’t replace the DNS and BIND, 4th Edition, but is a great compliment… Actually, I’m finding the 4th Edition a perfect compliment to the Cookbook.

Review by Andrew P. Kaplan:

Like the BIND book, the DNS and BIND cookbook is an invaluable reference for any DNS/Email/Web admin. This book answers many of the questions raised in the BIND book through numerous illuminating illustrations. It explains the differences between BIND 4, 8 and 9. Plus there’s a great section on email and even IPv6The DNS & BIND cook book coupled with the BIND book are truly the BIND bibles.

Review by J. P. Mens:

Ron Aitchison’s Pro DNS and BIND packs a whopping 550 pages of material which is easy to read for the novice or ongoing DNS administrator, and which is very well written (I greatly enjoyed the author’s style). After a short introduction in which I learnt some interesting facts about the provisioning of the root servers, the author implements a first zone describing the necessary concepts such as resource records, queries and zone transfers very clearly, followed by the different types of DNS setups (master, slave, caching, forwarding and stealth servers); these are covered in depth in chapter 7. Chapter five covers IPv6 and its relevance to BIND. Throughout the book, references to other DNS server implementations are given, but the primary focus is of course BIND 9.3.0.

Aitchison leads the reader through detailed installation of BIND on Linux, FreeBSD and even Windows (ISC has an installer for Windows in its portfolio), after which common DNS tasks are discussed (how to delegate a subdomain, how to define SPF records, etc. read it on-line here) as well as a chapter on tools.

The third part of the book is dedicated to securing DNS configurations with topics ranging from simple administrative issues (chroot jails) through securing DNS updates and zone transfers with TSIG and DNSSEC.bis which is covered very extensively in chapter 11.

Chapters 12 and 13 provide extensive commented references on BIND configuration and Zone files. There is of course plenty of on-line reference information on these two topics (including the author’s very good DNS for Rocket Scientists) but I like to have reference information on hardcopy (in the event my DNS servers fail, and I can’t reach the on-line documentation 🙂 )

In part 5 the author shortly covers programming with the BIND API and the resolver libraries, and he follows that with an interesting chapter on DNS Messages and Records, good to have if you want to sniff your way through DNS traffic.

The publisher’s web site carries a sample chapter as well as the source code to the book which is also available in TAR format on the author’s web site together with complementary information and pointers to further resources.

My only complaint about this otherwise excellent book is that on two or three occasions I read a paragraph that I thought I’d just read before; some duplication must have taken place (or I was tired). For the next edition, I’d like to read a chapter on interoperability between BIND and Microsoft Windows DNS servers, specifically regarding DNSSEC.

This book is an absolute must have for anybody who needs to understand DNS in the first place (irrespective of the implementation he or she plans to use), and it is a must have for a systems administrator who is either intending to deploy or has already deployed BIND 9.3. I wish I’d read this book before the first mentioned above.

Review by Harold McFarland:

The Domain Name System is a critical component of any large network or any computer connected to the Internet. While a home user would not need to setup a DNS server, business networks of any significant size would benefit from an internal server, DNS caching router or other components. This book takes the reader through a very good explanation of DNS and BIND, how it works, how to set it up, how to test it, and how to troubleshoot it. There are many books on DNS and BIND but most either assume a certain level of prior knowledge, provide theory without implementation information, or provide implementation information without any theory so you have no idea how to troubleshoot a problematic implementation. Author Ron Aitchison does an excellent job of discussing both theory and implementation in this book so you end up with a thorough education. He even covers the implementation of a secure DNS server. This book actually takes the reader from a level of complete novice through advanced DNS administrator and does an excellent job of it. Pro DNS and BIND is highly recommended and one of the better books on the subject available.