Appendix A. Appendices
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## Appendix A. Appendices

## Release Notes for BIND Version 9.9.7b1

### Introduction

This document summarizes changes since the last production release of BIND on the corresponding major release branch.

### Download

The latest versions of BIND 9 software can always be found at http://www.isc.org/downloads/. There you will find additional information about each release, source code, and pre-compiled versions for Microsoft Windows operating systems.

### Security Fixes

- A flaw in delegation handling could be exploited to put named into an infinite loop, in which each lookup of a name server triggered additional lookups of more name servers. This has been addressed by placing limits on the number of levels of recursion named will allow (default 7), and on the number of queries that it will send before terminating a recursive query (default 50).

  The recursion depth limit is configured via the `max-recursion-depth` option, and the query limit via the `max-recursion-queries` option.

  The flaw was discovered by Florian Maury of ANSSI, and is disclosed in CVE-2014-8500. [RT #37580]

### New Features

- None

### Feature Changes

- NXDOMAIN responses to queries of type DS are now cached separately from those for other types. This helps when using "grafted" zones of type forward, for which the parent zone does not contain a delegation, such as local top-level domains. Previously a query of type DS for such a zone could cause the zone apex to be cached as NXDOMAIN, blocking all subsequent queries. (Note: This change is only helpful when DNSSEC validation is not enabled. "Grafted" zones without a delegation in the parent are not a recommended configuration.)

- NOTIFY messages that are sent because a zone has been updated are now given priority above NOTIFY messages that were scheduled when the server started up. This should mitigate delays in zone propagation when servers are restarted frequently.

- Errors reported when running rndc addzone (e.g., when a zone file cannot be loaded) have been clarified to make it easier to diagnose problems.

- Added support for OPENPGPKEY type.

- When encountering an authoritative name server whose name is an alias pointing to another name, the resolver treats this as an error and skips to the next server. Previously this happened silently; now the error will be logged to the newly-created "cname" log category.

- If named is not configured to validate the answer then allow fallback to plain DNS on timeout even when we know the server supports EDNS. This will allow the server to potentially resolve signed queries when TCP is being blocked.

### Bug Fixes

- dig, host and nslookup aborted when encountering a name which, after appending search list elements, exceeded 255 bytes. Such names are now skipped, but processing of other names will continue. [RT #36892]

- The error message generated when named-checkzone or named-checkconf -z encounters a `$TTL` directive without a value has been clarified. [RT #37138]

- Semicolon characters (;) included in TXT records were incorrectly escaped with a backslash when the record was displayed as text. This is actually only necessary when there are no quotation marks. [RT #37159]

- When files opened for writing by named, such as zone journal files, were referenced more than once in `named.conf`, it could lead to file corruption as multiple threads wrote to the same file. This is now detected when loading `named.conf` and reported as an error. [RT #37172]

- dnssec-keygen -S failed to generate successor keys for some algorithm types (including ECDSA and GOST) due to a difference in the content of private key files. This has been corrected. [RT #37183]

- UPDATE messages that arrived too soon after an rndc thaw could be lost. [RT #37233]

- Forwarding of UPDATE messages did not work when they were signed with SIG(0); they resulted in a BADSIG response code. [RT #37216]

- When checking for updates to trust anchors listed in `managed-keys`, named now revalidates keys based on the current set of active trust anchors, without relying on any cached record of previous validation. [RT #37506]

- When NXDOMAIN redirection is in use, queries for a name that is present in the redirection zone but a type that is not present will now return NOERROR instead of NXDOMAIN.

- When a zone contained a delegation to an IPv6 name server but not an IPv4 name server, it was possible for a memory reference to be left un-freed. This caused an assertion failure on server shutdown, but was otherwise harmless. [RT #37796]

- Due to an inadvertent removal of code in the previous release, when named encountered an authoritative name server which dropped all EDNS queries, it did not always try plain DNS. This has been corrected. [RT #37965]

- A regression caused nsupdate to use the default recursive servers rather than the SOA MNAME server when sending the UPDATE.

- Adjusted max-recursion-queries to better accommodate empty caches.

### End of Life

The BIND 9.9 (Extended Support Version) will be supported until June, 2017. https://www.isc.org/downloads/software-support-policy/

### Thank You

Thank you to everyone who assisted us in making this release possible. If you would like to contribute to ISC to assist us in continuing to make quality open source software, please visit our donations page at http://www.isc.org/donate/.

## Acknowledgments

### A Brief History of the DNS and BIND

Although the "official" beginning of the Domain Name System occurred in 1984 with the publication of RFC 920, the core of the new system was described in 1983 in RFCs 882 and 883. From 1984 to 1987, the ARPAnet (the precursor to today's Internet) became a testbed of experimentation for developing the new naming/addressing scheme in a rapidly expanding, operational network environment. New RFCs were written and published in 1987 that modified the original documents to incorporate improvements based on the working model. RFC 1034, "Domain Names-Concepts and Facilities", and RFC 1035, "Domain Names-Implementation and Specification" were published and became the standards upon which all DNS implementations are built.

The first working domain name server, called "Jeeves", was written in 1983-84 by Paul Mockapetris for operation on DEC Tops-20 machines located at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI) and SRI International's Network Information Center (SRI-NIC). A DNS server for Unix machines, the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) package, was written soon after by a group of graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley under a grant from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA).

Versions of BIND through 4.8.3 were maintained by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at UC Berkeley. Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle and Songnian Zhou made up the initial BIND project team. After that, additional work on the software package was done by Ralph Campbell. Kevin Dunlap, a Digital Equipment Corporation employee on loan to the CSRG, worked on BIND for 2 years, from 1985 to 1987. Many other people also contributed to BIND development during that time: Doug Kingston, Craig Partridge, Smoot Carl-Mitchell, Mike Muuss, Jim Bloom and Mike Schwartz. BIND maintenance was subsequently handled by Mike Karels and Øivind Kure.

BIND versions 4.9 and 4.9.1 were released by Digital Equipment Corporation (now Compaq Computer Corporation). Paul Vixie, then a DEC employee, became BIND's primary caretaker. He was assisted by Phil Almquist, 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 others.

In 1994, BIND version 4.9.2 was sponsored by Vixie Enterprises. Paul Vixie became BIND's principal architect/programmer.

BIND versions from 4.9.3 onward have been developed and maintained by the Internet Systems Consortium and its predecessor, the Internet Software Consortium, with support being provided by ISC's sponsors.

As co-architects/programmers, Bob Halley and Paul Vixie released the first production-ready version of BIND version 8 in May 1997.

BIND version 9 was released in September 2000 and is a major rewrite of nearly all aspects of the underlying BIND architecture.

BIND versions 4 and 8 are officially deprecated. No additional development is done on BIND version 4 or BIND version 8.

BIND development work is made possible today by the sponsorship of several corporations, and by the tireless work efforts of numerous individuals.

## General DNS Reference Information

### IPv6 addresses (AAAA)

IPv6 addresses are 128-bit identifiers for interfaces and sets of interfaces which were introduced in the DNS to facilitate scalable Internet routing. There are three types of addresses: Unicast, an identifier for a single interface; Anycast, an identifier for a set of interfaces; and Multicast, an identifier for a set of interfaces. Here we describe the global Unicast address scheme. For more information, see RFC 3587, "Global Unicast Address Format."

IPv6 unicast addresses consist of a global routing prefix, a subnet identifier, and an interface identifier.

The global routing prefix is provided by the upstream provider or ISP, and (roughly) corresponds to the IPv4 network section of the address range. The subnet identifier is for local subnetting, much the same as subnetting an IPv4 /16 network into /24 subnets. The interface identifier is the address of an individual interface on a given network; in IPv6, addresses belong to interfaces rather than to machines.

The subnetting capability of IPv6 is much more flexible than that of IPv4: subnetting can be carried out on bit boundaries, in much the same way as Classless InterDomain Routing (CIDR), and the DNS PTR representation ("nibble" format) makes setting up reverse zones easier.

The Interface Identifier must be unique on the local link, and is usually generated automatically by the IPv6 implementation, although it is usually possible to override the default setting if necessary. A typical IPv6 address might look like: 2001:db8:201:9:a00:20ff:fe81:2b32

IPv6 address specifications often contain long strings of zeros, so the architects have included a shorthand for specifying them. The double colon (`::') indicates the longest possible string of zeros that can fit, and can be used only once in an address.

## Bibliography (and Suggested Reading)

### Request for Comments (RFCs)

Specification documents for the Internet protocol suite, including the DNS, are published as part of the Request for Comments (RFCs) series of technical notes. The standards themselves are defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). RFCs can be obtained online via FTP at:

ftp://www.isi.edu/in-notes/RFC`xxxx`.txt

(where `xxxx` is the number of the RFC). RFCs are also available via the Web at:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/.

#### Bibliography

### Standards

[RFC974] C. Partridge. Mail Routing and the Domain System. January 1986.

[RFC1034] P.V. Mockapetris. Domain Names — Concepts and Facilities. November 1987.

[RFC1035] P. V. Mockapetris. Domain Names — Implementation and Specification. November 1987.

### Proposed Standards

[RFC2181] R., R. Bush Elz. Clarifications to the DNS Specification. July 1997.

[RFC2308] M. Andrews. Negative Caching of DNS Queries. March 1998.

[RFC1995] M. Ohta. Incremental Zone Transfer in DNS. August 1996.

[RFC1996] P. Vixie. A Mechanism for Prompt Notification of Zone Changes. August 1996.

[RFC2136] P. Vixie, S. Thomson, Y. Rekhter, and J. Bound. Dynamic Updates in the Domain Name System. April 1997.

[RFC2671] P. Vixie. Extension Mechanisms for DNS (EDNS0). August 1997.

[RFC2672] M. Crawford. Non-Terminal DNS Name Redirection. August 1999.

[RFC2845] P. Vixie, O. Gudmundsson, D. Eastlake, 3rd, and B. Wellington. Secret Key Transaction Authentication for DNS (TSIG). May 2000.

[RFC2930] D. Eastlake, 3rd. Secret Key Establishment for DNS (TKEY RR). September 2000.

[RFC2931] D. Eastlake, 3rd. DNS Request and Transaction Signatures (SIG(0)s). September 2000.

[RFC3007] B. Wellington. Secure Domain Name System (DNS) Dynamic Update. November 2000.

[RFC3645] S. Kwan, P. Garg, J. Gilroy, L. Esibov, J. Westhead, and R. Hall. Generic Security Service Algorithm for Secret Key Transaction Authentication for DNS (GSS-TSIG). October 2003.

### DNS Security Proposed Standards

[RFC3225] D. Conrad. Indicating Resolver Support of DNSSEC. December 2001.

[RFC3833] D. Atkins and R. Austein. Threat Analysis of the Domain Name System (DNS). August 2004.

[RFC4033] R. Arends, R. Austein, M. Larson, D. Massey, and S. Rose. DNS Security Introduction and Requirements. March 2005.

[RFC4034] R. Arends, R. Austein, M. Larson, D. Massey, and S. Rose. Resource Records for the DNS Security Extensions. March 2005.

[RFC4035] R. Arends, R. Austein, M. Larson, D. Massey, and S. Rose. Protocol Modifications for the DNS Security Extensions. March 2005.

### Other Important RFCs About DNS Implementation

[RFC1535] E. Gavron. A Security Problem and Proposed Correction With Widely Deployed DNS Software.. October 1993.

[RFC1536] A. Kumar, J. Postel, C. Neuman, P. Danzig, and S. Miller. Common DNS Implementation Errors and Suggested Fixes. October 1993.

[RFC1982] R. Elz and R. Bush. Serial Number Arithmetic. August 1996.

[RFC4074] Y. Morishita and T. Jinmei. Common Misbehaviour Against DNS Queries for IPv6 Addresses. May 2005.

### Resource Record Types

[RFC1183] C.F. Everhart, L. A. Mamakos, R. Ullmann, and P. Mockapetris. New DNS RR Definitions. October 1990.

[RFC1706] B. Manning and R. Colella. DNS NSAP Resource Records. October 1994.

[RFC2168] R. Daniel and M. Mealling. Resolution of Uniform Resource Identifiers using the Domain Name System. June 1997.

[RFC1876] C. Davis, P. Vixie, T., and I. Dickinson. A Means for Expressing Location Information in the Domain Name System. January 1996.

[RFC2052] A. Gulbrandsen and P. Vixie. A DNS RR for Specifying the Location of Services.. October 1996.

[RFC2163] A. Allocchio. Using the Internet DNS to Distribute MIXER Conformant Global Address Mapping. January 1998.

[RFC2230] R. Atkinson. Key Exchange Delegation Record for the DNS. October 1997.

[RFC2536] D. Eastlake, 3rd. DSA KEYs and SIGs in the Domain Name System (DNS). March 1999.

[RFC2537] D. Eastlake, 3rd. RSA/MD5 KEYs and SIGs in the Domain Name System (DNS). March 1999.

[RFC2538] D. Eastlake, 3rd and O. Gudmundsson. Storing Certificates in the Domain Name System (DNS). March 1999.

[RFC2539] D. Eastlake, 3rd. Storage of Diffie-Hellman Keys in the Domain Name System (DNS). March 1999.

[RFC2540] D. Eastlake, 3rd. Detached Domain Name System (DNS) Information. March 1999.

[RFC2782] A. Gulbrandsen. P. Vixie. L. Esibov. A DNS RR for specifying the location of services (DNS SRV). February 2000.

[RFC2915] M. Mealling. R. Daniel. The Naming Authority Pointer (NAPTR) DNS Resource Record. September 2000.

[RFC3110] D. Eastlake, 3rd. RSA/SHA-1 SIGs and RSA KEYs in the Domain Name System (DNS). May 2001.

[RFC3123] P. Koch. A DNS RR Type for Lists of Address Prefixes (APL RR). June 2001.

[RFC3596] S. Thomson, C. Huitema, V. Ksinant, and M. Souissi. DNS Extensions to support IP version 6. October 2003.

[RFC3597] A. Gustafsson. Handling of Unknown DNS Resource Record (RR) Types. September 2003.

### DNS and the Internet

[RFC1101] P. V. Mockapetris. DNS Encoding of Network Names and Other Types. April 1989.

[RFC1123] Braden. Requirements for Internet Hosts - Application and Support. October 1989.

[RFC1591] J. Postel. Domain Name System Structure and Delegation. March 1994.

[RFC2317] H. Eidnes, G. de Groot, and P. Vixie. Classless IN-ADDR.ARPA Delegation. March 1998.

[RFC2826] Internet Architecture Board. IAB Technical Comment on the Unique DNS Root. May 2000.

[RFC2929] D. Eastlake, 3rd, E. Brunner-Williams, and B. Manning. Domain Name System (DNS) IANA Considerations. September 2000.

### DNS Operations

[RFC1033] M. Lottor. Domain administrators operations guide.. November 1987.

[RFC1537] P. Beertema. Common DNS Data File Configuration Errors. October 1993.

[RFC1912] D. Barr. Common DNS Operational and Configuration Errors. February 1996.

[RFC2010] B. Manning and P. Vixie. Operational Criteria for Root Name Servers.. October 1996.

[RFC2219] M. Hamilton and R. Wright. Use of DNS Aliases for Network Services.. October 1997.

### Internationalized Domain Names

[RFC2825] IAB and R. Daigle. A Tangled Web: Issues of I18N, Domain Names, and the Other Internet protocols. May 2000.

[RFC3490] P. Faltstrom, P. Hoffman, and A. Costello. Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA). March 2003.

[RFC3491] P. Hoffman and M. Blanchet. Nameprep: A Stringprep Profile for Internationalized Domain Names. March 2003.

[RFC3492] A. Costello. Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA). March 2003.

### Other DNS-related RFCs

### Note

Note: the following list of RFCs, although DNS-related, are not concerned with implementing software.

[RFC1464] R. Rosenbaum. Using the Domain Name System To Store Arbitrary String Attributes. May 1993.

[RFC1713] A. Romao. Tools for DNS Debugging. November 1994.

[RFC1794] T. Brisco. DNS Support for Load Balancing. April 1995.

[RFC2240] O. Vaughan. A Legal Basis for Domain Name Allocation. November 1997.

[RFC2345] J. Klensin, T. Wolf, and G. Oglesby. Domain Names and Company Name Retrieval. May 1998.

[RFC2352] O. Vaughan. A Convention For Using Legal Names as Domain Names. May 1998.

[RFC3071] J. Klensin. Reflections on the DNS, RFC 1591, and Categories of Domains. February 2001.

[RFC3258] T. Hardie. Distributing Authoritative Name Servers via Shared Unicast Addresses. April 2002.

[RFC3901] A. Durand and J. Ihren. DNS IPv6 Transport Operational Guidelines. September 2004.

### Obsolete and Unimplemented Experimental RFC

[RFC1712] C. Farrell, M. Schulze, S. Pleitner, and D. Baldoni. DNS Encoding of Geographical Location. November 1994.

[RFC2673] M. Crawford. Binary Labels in the Domain Name System. August 1999.

[RFC2874] M. Crawford and C. Huitema. DNS Extensions to Support IPv6 Address Aggregation and Renumbering. July 2000.

### Obsoleted DNS Security RFCs

### Note

Most of these have been consolidated into RFC4033, RFC4034 and RFC4035 which collectively describe DNSSECbis.

[RFC2065] D. Eastlake, 3rd and C. Kaufman. Domain Name System Security Extensions. January 1997.

[RFC2137] D. Eastlake, 3rd. Secure Domain Name System Dynamic Update. April 1997.

[RFC2535] D. Eastlake, 3rd. Domain Name System Security Extensions. March 1999.

[RFC3008] B. Wellington. Domain Name System Security (DNSSEC) Signing Authority. November 2000.

[RFC3090] E. Lewis. DNS Security Extension Clarification on Zone Status. March 2001.

[RFC3445] D. Massey and S. Rose. Limiting the Scope of the KEY Resource Record (RR). December 2002.

[RFC3655] B. Wellington and O. Gudmundsson. Redefinition of DNS Authenticated Data (AD) bit. November 2003.

[RFC3658] O. Gudmundsson. Delegation Signer (DS) Resource Record (RR). December 2003.

[RFC3755] S. Weiler. Legacy Resolver Compatibility for Delegation Signer (DS). May 2004.

[RFC3757] O. Kolkman, J. Schlyter, and E. Lewis. Domain Name System KEY (DNSKEY) Resource Record (RR) Secure Entry Point (SEP) Flag. April 2004.

[RFC3845] J. Schlyter. DNS Security (DNSSEC) NextSECure (NSEC) RDATA Format. August 2004.

### Internet Drafts

Internet Drafts (IDs) are rough-draft working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force. They are, in essence, RFCs in the preliminary stages of development. Implementors are cautioned not to regard IDs as archival, and they should not be quoted or cited in any formal documents unless accompanied by the disclaimer that they are "works in progress." IDs have a lifespan of six months after which they are deleted unless updated by their authors.

### Other Documents About BIND

#### Bibliography

Paul Albitz and Cricket Liu. DNS and BIND. Copyright © 1998 Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly and Associates.

## BIND 9 DNS Library Support

This version of BIND 9 "exports" its internal libraries so that they can be used by third-party applications more easily (we call them "export" libraries in this document). In addition to all major DNS-related APIs BIND 9 is currently using, the export libraries provide the following features:

- The newly created "DNS client" module. This is a higher level API that provides an interface to name resolution, single DNS transaction with a particular server, and dynamic update. Regarding name resolution, it supports advanced features such as DNSSEC validation and caching. This module supports both synchronous and asynchronous mode.

- The new "IRS" (Information Retrieval System) library. It provides an interface to parse the traditional resolv.conf file and more advanced, DNS-specific configuration file for the rest of this package (see the description for the dns.conf file below).

- As part of the IRS library, newly implemented standard address-name mapping functions, getaddrinfo() and getnameinfo(), are provided. They use the DNSSEC-aware validating resolver backend, and could use other advanced features of the BIND 9 libraries such as caching. The getaddrinfo() function resolves both A and AAAA RRs concurrently (when the address family is unspecified).

- An experimental framework to support other event libraries than BIND 9's internal event task system.

### Prerequisite

GNU make is required to build the export libraries (other part of BIND 9 can still be built with other types of make). In the reminder of this document, "make" means GNU make. Note that in some platforms you may need to invoke a different command name than "make" (e.g. "gmake") to indicate it's GNU make.

### Compilation

    $ ./configure --enable-exportlib [other flags]
    $ make

This will create (in addition to usual BIND 9 programs) and a separate set of libraries under the lib/export directory. For example, `lib/export/dns/libdns.a` is the archive file of the export version of the BIND 9 DNS library. Sample application programs using the libraries will also be built under the lib/export/samples directory (see below).

### Installation

    $ cd lib/export
    $ make install

This will install library object files under the directory specified by the --with-export-libdir configure option (default: EPREFIX/lib/bind9), and header files under the directory specified by the --with-export-includedir configure option (default: PREFIX/include/bind9). Root privilege is normally required. "make install" at the top directory will do the same.

To see how to build your own application after the installation, see `lib/export/samples/Makefile-postinstall.in`.

### Known Defects/Restrictions

- Currently, win32 is not supported for the export library. (Normal BIND 9 application can be built as before).

- The "fixed" RRset order is not (currently) supported in the export library. If you want to use "fixed" RRset order for, e.g. named while still building the export library even without the fixed order support, build them separately:

      $ ./configure --enable-fixed-rrset [other flags, but not --enable-exportlib]
      $ make
      $ ./configure --enable-exportlib [other flags, but not --enable-fixed-rrset]
      $ cd lib/export
      $ make

- The client module and the IRS library currently do not support DNSSEC validation using DLV (the underlying modules can handle it, but there is no tunable interface to enable the feature).

- RFC 5011 is not supported in the validating stub resolver of the export library. In fact, it is not clear whether it should: trust anchors would be a system-wide configuration which would be managed by an administrator, while the stub resolver will be used by ordinary applications run by a normal user.

- Not all common `/etc/resolv.conf` options are supported in the IRS library. The only available options in this version are "debug" and "ndots".

### The dns.conf File

The IRS library supports an "advanced" configuration file related to the DNS library for configuration parameters that would be beyond the capability of the `resolv.conf` file. Specifically, it is intended to provide DNSSEC related configuration parameters. By default the path to this configuration file is `/etc/dns.conf`. This module is very experimental and the configuration syntax or library interfaces may change in future versions. Currently, only the trusted-keys statement is supported, whose syntax is the same as the same name of statement for `named.conf`. (See the section called “trusted-keys Statement Grammar” for details.)

### Sample Applications

Some sample application programs using this API are provided for reference. The following is a brief description of these applications.

#### sample: a simple stub resolver utility

It sends a query of a given name (of a given optional RR type) to a specified recursive server, and prints the result as a list of RRs. It can also act as a validating stub resolver if a trust anchor is given via a set of command line options.

Usage: sample [options] server_address hostname

Options and Arguments:

-t RRtype

  specify the RR type of the query. The default is the A RR.

[-a algorithm] [-e] -k keyname -K keystring

  specify a command-line DNS key to validate the answer. For example, to specify the following DNSKEY of example.com:

  example.com. 3600 IN DNSKEY 257 3 5 xxx

  specify the options as follows:

                -e -k example.com -K "xxx"

  -e means that this key is a zone's "key signing key" (as known as "secure Entry point"). When -a is omitted rsasha1 will be used by default.

-s domain:alt_server_address

  specify a separate recursive server address for the specific "domain". Example: -s example.com:2001:db8::1234

server_address

  an IP(v4/v6) address of the recursive server to which queries are sent.

hostname

  the domain name for the query

#### sample-async: a simple stub resolver, working asynchronously

Similar to "sample", but accepts a list of (query) domain names as a separate file and resolves the names asynchronously.

Usage: sample-async [-s server_address] [-t RR_type] input_file

Options and Arguments:

-s server_address
  an IPv4 address of the recursive server to which queries are sent. (IPv6 addresses are not supported in this implementation)
-t RR_type
  specify the RR type of the queries. The default is the A RR.
input_file
  a list of domain names to be resolved. each line consists of a single domain name. Example:

  www.example.com
  mx.example.net
  ns.xxx.example

#### sample-request: a simple DNS transaction client

It sends a query to a specified server, and prints the response with minimal processing. It doesn't act as a "stub resolver": it stops the processing once it gets any response from the server, whether it's a referral or an alias (CNAME or DNAME) that would require further queries to get the ultimate answer. In other words, this utility acts as a very simplified dig.

Usage: sample-request [-t RRtype] server_address hostname

Options and Arguments:

-t RRtype

  specify the RR type of the queries. The default is the A RR.

server_address

  an IP(v4/v6) address of the recursive server to which the query is sent.

hostname

  the domain name for the query

#### sample-gai: getaddrinfo() and getnameinfo() test code

This is a test program to check getaddrinfo() and getnameinfo() behavior. It takes a host name as an argument, calls getaddrinfo() with the given host name, and calls getnameinfo() with the resulting IP addresses returned by getaddrinfo(). If the dns.conf file exists and defines a trust anchor, the underlying resolver will act as a validating resolver, and getaddrinfo()/getnameinfo() will fail with an EAI_INSECUREDATA error when DNSSEC validation fails.

Usage: sample-gai hostname

#### sample-update: a simple dynamic update client program

It accepts a single update command as a command-line argument, sends an update request message to the authoritative server, and shows the response from the server. In other words, this is a simplified nsupdate.

Usage: sample-update [options] (add|delete) "update data"

Options and Arguments:

-a auth_server

  An IP address of the authoritative server that has authority for the zone containing the update name. This should normally be the primary authoritative server that accepts dynamic updates. It can also be a secondary server that is configured to forward update requests to the primary server.

-k keyfile

  A TSIG key file to secure the update transaction. The keyfile format is the same as that for the nsupdate utility.

-p prerequisite

  A prerequisite for the update (only one prerequisite can be specified). The prerequisite format is the same as that is accepted by the nsupdate utility.

-r recursive_server

  An IP address of a recursive server that this utility will use. A recursive server may be necessary to identify the authoritative server address to which the update request is sent.

-z zonename

  The domain name of the zone that contains

(add|delete)

  Specify the type of update operation. Either "add" or "delete" must be specified.

"update data"

  Specify the data to be updated. A typical example of the data would look like "name TTL RRtype RDATA".

### Note

In practice, either -a or -r must be specified. Others can be optional; the underlying library routine tries to identify the appropriate server and the zone name for the update.

Examples: assuming the primary authoritative server of the dynamic.example.com zone has an IPv6 address 2001:db8::1234,

    $ sample-update -a sample-update -k Kxxx.+nnn+mmmm.key add "foo.dynamic.example.com 30 IN A 192.168.2.1"

adds an A RR for foo.dynamic.example.com using the given key.

    $ sample-update -a sample-update -k Kxxx.+nnn+mmmm.key delete "foo.dynamic.example.com 30 IN A"

removes all A RRs for foo.dynamic.example.com using the given key.

    $ sample-update -a sample-update -k Kxxx.+nnn+mmmm.key delete "foo.dynamic.example.com"

removes all RRs for foo.dynamic.example.com using the given key.

#### nsprobe: domain/name server checker in terms of RFC 4074

It checks a set of domains to see the name servers of the domains behave correctly in terms of RFC 4074. This is included in the set of sample programs to show how the export library can be used in a DNS-related application.

Usage: nsprobe [-d] [-v [-v...]] [-c cache_address] [input_file]

Options

-d

  run in the "debug" mode. with this option nsprobe will dump every RRs it receives.

-v

  increase verbosity of other normal log messages. This can be specified multiple times

-c cache_address

  specify an IP address of a recursive (caching) name server. nsprobe uses this server to get the NS RRset of each domain and the A and/or AAAA RRsets for the name servers. The default value is 127.0.0.1.

input_file

  a file name containing a list of domain (zone) names to be probed. when omitted the standard input will be used. Each line of the input file specifies a single domain name such as "example.com". In general this domain name must be the apex name of some DNS zone (unlike normal "host names" such as "www.example.com"). nsprobe first identifies the NS RRsets for the given domain name, and sends A and AAAA queries to these servers for some "widely used" names under the zone; specifically, adding "www" and "ftp" to the zone name.

### Library References

As of this writing, there is no formal "manual" of the libraries, except this document, header files (some of them provide pretty detailed explanations), and sample application programs.

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