DNS and BIND (5th Edition)

Foreword: I have been running my own DNS servers on OpenBSD and FreeBSD for about 4 years. All of my previous DNS knowledge was obtained from the man pages and online tutorials. The book is great because the example network used throughout the book is built upon, showing you how to "grow" your DNS with your expanding network. The design and implementation presented is priceless and covers some of my favorite topics: placement of slaves, hidden primaries, building root servers, split views, daisy-chaining, forwarders, partial-slaves, address maintenance issues, etc. The pros and cons of each setup are weighed and best practices are suggested. If you like a generous helping of diagrams, examples, and tables as a learning aid, you won't be disappointed. One specific example of weighing the pros and the cons is presented on page 479 as follows: "Could we have saved a few bucks on hardware by using our external authoritative nameservers as forwarders, too? Sure, but that would have presented a risk." After that statement, they proceed into all the details of "why." There is adequate coverage on security. The authors preach defense in depth. An implementation example includes hiding your masters and only exposing bastion slaves. Securing communications between the masters and slaves is also covered in the security chapter using DNSSEC and TSIG. I think IPSec is another way to add a security layer, but that is probably another book. After reading the book, I started to implement my new DNS infrastructure and found myself referring to the index often. It is fairly consummate, however, I found a few things missing, such as the $GENERATE statement. Also, some of the configuration details were lacking slightly. For example, the order in which ACL elements are processed and how negated elements affect the processing outcome. Another question I had was, what would happen if an ACL name is negated, and what if that ACL contained some negated elements. Well I found my answer by actually trying it and verifying with the canonical reference docs on isc.org. I gave this book five stars because of its effectiveness in presenting the concepts and implementations of DNS using examples, good writing style, tables, and diagrams. If you're looking for the last 4 percent of the diminutive details of DNS, you will find it on isc.org.

The Book is a good reference for BIND9 DNS administration. Although, at this time, it's a bit outdated. It wasn't written to reference DNSSEC, or other new configurations.

Overall it was an OK book. I am already "competent" with DNS, specifically the BIND9 implementation but I got the book as reference material since the official documentation is a little sparse. The fifth edition (not sure about the others) even covers, albeit a little too briefly, how to deal with reverse lookup zones with subnet masks that do not fall on octet boundaries.

This is the most complete and must-have DNS book i've ever seen before. Nor only prepares you to understand every basic and some advanced issues about DNS, it also shows a lot of "tricks" with the most powerfull and well know - famous DNS implementation!: BIND. If you are a beginner in the DNS world, this is a good step towards become an expert, if you're already an expert this guide will surely show you a lot of useful information in your daily DNS administration problems. Definitely, this was one of my best investments on my way to become a site administrator.

The encyclopedia of DNS books, meaning thicker than a phone book. I like the fact that this book is thick but so easy to read and follow along with. If you know nothing about DNS, this book makes it easy to learn about DNS. It starts with the history of DNS and then explains the hierarchy of the DNS tree. A must read if you want to improve your understanding of the internet and what happens under the hood for name resolution.

I was interested in finding out more about how DNS is deployed and operated in practice. The first few chapters in this book deliver very well in this regard. My motivation was to find out more about how a certain type of Internet attack -- the "open DNS resolver attack" -- works. Even though this book was written well before this attack became popular and well known -- and therefore the attack is not mentioned, let alone analyzed -- the book was still quite helpful to me.

The book arrived in perfect condition. This a reference of dns related knowledge.

DNS is one of those concepts that is almost kept in mystery in the tech world. The knowledge seems to be passed by word of mouth, and there doesn't seem to be one good repository to go to as an information source. That is not to say that this book is all inclusive, no book can contain every piece of knowledge you need/desire, especially on such a complex topic. This book however does a phenomenal job of demystifying the subject and giving a good, practical understanding of how DNS and BIND work. I would highly recommend this book to anyone, whether it be the new network/sys admin who has just had complex networking needs dropped on his lap, or even the seasoned network admin who needs a good convenient reference on occasion.

Die Anschaffung hat sich gelohnt! Auch wenn das englische Buch nicht so leicht zu lesen ist wie mein älteres, deutsches Buch über Bind v.8. (Bind und DNS 1999). Nach den ersten 75 Seiten war die funktionsfähige Installation und der Betrieb des Bind v.9.4.x auf SUSE 11 erfolgreich.

Le DNS est peut-être le service Internet le plus utilisé: à chaque fois que vous envoyez un mail, à chaque fois que vous chargez une page web, le Domain Name System est impliqué. Son rôle peut se résumer en quelques mots: c'est un annuaire qui fait la correspondance entre un nom d'hôte et une adresse IP. Mais se contenter de cette définition, c'est négliger la complexité de la bête. Complexité que l'on peut mesurer au nombre d'abréviations cabalistiques qui entrent en jeu dès qu'on s'y intéresse de plus près: A, AAAA, PTR, MX, SOA, TSIG, DNSSEC, ... C'est la signification de ces termes, et bien plus, que vous découvrirez dans DNS and BIND. Pour ceux qui ne connaissent pas le DNS, les trois premiers chapitres serviront à planter le décor. En une cinquantaine de pages vous apprendrez: * Quelles sont les origines du DNS? * Comment fonctionne-t-il? * Qu'est-ce qu'une Zone ou un Resolver? * Quelle est la différence entre un Registry et un Registar? Ensuite, à partir de chapitre 4, les choses sérieuses commenceront. D'abord avec l'installation de BIND 9. Puis dans les chapitres suivants avec la configuration des clients (Unix-like et Windows) ou la maintenance de votre serveur. Dès les premières pages de cette partie nous voici plongé dans les fichiers de zones. Mais les auteurs réussissent tout de même la prouesse de maintenir les choses claires tout au long du texte. Et le reste du livre sera dans la même veine. J'ajouterai tout de même une mention particulière pour le chapitre 6 "Security". En effet, tout critique que soit le DNS pour Internet ou votre réseau d'entreprise, la sécurité a jusqu'à très récemment été négligée. Ce qui sera enfin réparé avec la lecture de ce chapitre. Si vous trouverez dans ce livre virtuellement tout ce que vous devez savoir sur le DNS "en général", le serveur de référence étudié tout au long du livre reste BIND version 9. C'est à dire que vous ne trouverez pas de support exhaustif pour d'autres serveurs DNS ou pour les environnements serveurs Microsoft. Malgré cela, le texte est tout de même émaille de références pour vous permettre d'intégrer au mieux les machines Windows à votre réseau (notamment configuration des clients Windows, intégration avec WINS ou ActiveDirectory). Vous l'avez compris, ce livre s'adresse avant tout à l'administrateur chargé de déployer un serveur BIND sur son réseau. Cependant, les utilisateurs avancés du DNS pourront aussi y trouver leur compte. Ainsi, l'administrateur d'un service de messagerie sera sans doute intéressé par le chapitre 5 "DNS and Electronic Mail". Quand aux programmeurs, ils ne seront pas non plus en reste avec le chapitre 15 qui décrit l'API C et Perl pour accéder au resolver. Au final, cette troisième édition de DNS and BIND est donc un livre très complet à même de satisfaire un public varié. Encore une réussite d'O'Reilly!

You can set up DNS by following instructions found on The Internet, but if anything goes wrong you could spend considerable time looking for relevant information to fix it, and even more time making sense of the, sometimes conflicting, advice/explanations. I am still reading this book (currently finishing chapter 4), but I have found it full of well structured information that puts DSN and BIND into context so the rather brief explanations of setting up a DNS server that I have read elsewhere now make much more sense. By the end of chapter 4 I should be able to get my server set up and accessible from The Internet, if required, and be confident that it will do what I expect. Later chapters provide information about other configurations, troubleshooting, expanding the network, security etc. For a technical reference, I am finding this book to be easy to read. If you are intending to have your own server on The Internet then I would classify this book as essential. If you just want to get DNS working correctly within your own organisation or personal small network this book should simplify life considerably.

A must read for any level of network administrator.

Se você precisa estudar algo sobre DNS e BIND este é o livro! De facil entendimento e abrange bem o assunto, se bem que não tenho nada a reclamar sobre a editora, todos os livros que já li deles é ótimo