BIND – Out With the Old, and In With the New

As per ISC’s Software Support Policy, we have designated the 9.7 branch of BIND 9 as End of Life. This means there will be no further bug fixes for this branch. We urge all customers running 9.7 or earlier to upgrade to our 9.9 branch.

BIND 9.9 includes important bug and security fixes, and ISC has made a public commitment to designate BIND 9.9 as our next Extended Support Version (ESV), ensuring that it will receive critical updates for years to come.

The 9.6-ESV branch will be EOL’d by June, 2013.

ISC released 9.9.0 in February of 2012, and its features were highlighted in these two blogs by Evan Hunt: ISC BIND 9.9.0a1 — Feature Preview and BIND 9.9.0b2 - A Feature Update.

Additionally, ISC’s CTO, Joao Damas, wrote an informative and important blog: BIND 9.9 - Why Should You Care? … and we hope you do care.

The full list of improvements to each version can be tracked in our release notes for BIND, but for operators who are considering switching to 9.9 for the first time here are some of the improvements we think you will especially appreciate.

• If you're using DNSSEC you'll find BIND 9.9 features significant improvements to DNSSEC usability and functionality, including inline signing, the easiest method for zone signing yet, support for a variety of other signing methods to suit your work flow, new tools to help check your zones for DNSSEC compliance, and support for new signing algorithms.
• All operators of BIND 9.9 can benefit from the performance work we've done, especially improved worker thread handling and better tuning of default parameters to achieve superior performance "out of the box."
• BIND 9.9 supports NXDOMAIN redirection, a feature requested by many of our customers and now available for operators wishing to use this feature.