History of the Domain Name System: The First DNS Servers

Last time we began to tell the story of DNS - remembered how the project started, and what problems were intended to be solved in the ARPANET network. Today we'll talk about the first BIND DNS server.

A photo - John Markos O'Neill — CC BY SA

First DNS servers

After Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel in 1983 proposed a concept domain names for the ARPANET, it quickly won the approval of the IT community. One of the first to put it into practice were engineers from the University of Berkeley. In 1984, four students introduced the first DNS server, the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND). They worked under a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The system developed by university students automatically converted a DNS name to an IP address and vice versa. Interestingly, when her code was uploaded to BSD (software distribution system), the first sources already had a version number of 4.3. At first, employees of the university laboratories used the DNS server. Until version 4.8.3, members of the Berkeley University Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) were responsible for the development of BIND, but in the second half of the 1980s, the DNS server broke out of the university - it was handed over to Paul Vixie from a corporation DEC. Paul released the 4.9 and 4.9.1 updates, and then founded the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), which has been responsible for maintaining BIND ever since. According to Paul, all previous versions relied on code from students at Berkeley, and over the past fifteen years, he has completely exhausted his opportunities for modernization. So in 2000, BIND was rewritten from scratch.

The BIND server includes several libraries and components at once that implement the "client-server" DNS architecture and are responsible for configuring the functions of the DNS server. BIND is widespread, especially on Linux, and remains a popular DNS server implementation. This decision installed on servers that support root zone.

There are also alternatives to BIND. For example, PowerDNS, which comes with Linux distributions. It is written by Bert Hubert of the Dutch company PowerDNS.COM and maintained by the open source community. In 2005, PowerDNS was implemented on the servers of the Wikimedia Foundation. The solution is also used by large cloud providers, European telecommunications companies and Fortune 500 organizations.

BIND and PowerDNS are among the most common, but not the only DNS servers. Also worth noting Unbound, djbdns и dnsmasq.

Development of the domain name system

Throughout the history of the DNS, many changes have been made to its specification. As one of the first and major updates added NOTIFY and IXFR mechanisms in 1996. They have simplified the replication of the Domain Name System databases between the primary and secondary servers. The new solution made it possible to configure notifications about changing DNS records. This approach guaranteed the identity of the secondary and primary DNS zones, plus saved traffic - synchronization occurred only when necessary, and not at fixed intervals.

A photo - Richard Mason — CC BY SA

Initially, the DNS network was not available to the general public and potential information security problems were not a priority when developing the system, but this approach made itself felt later. With the development of the Internet, system vulnerabilities began to be exploited - for example, attacks such as DNS spoofing appeared. In this case, the cache of DNS servers is filled with data that does not have an authoritative source, and requests are redirected to attackers' servers.

To solve the problem, in DNS introduced crypto-signatures for DNS responses (DNSSEC) is a mechanism that allows you to build a chain of trust for a domain from the root zone. Note that a similar mechanism was added to authenticate hosts during the transfer of the DNS zone - it was called TSIG.


Modifications that simplify DNS replication and fix security issues have been welcomed by the IT community. But there were also changes that the community did not take in the best way. In particular, the transition from free to paid domain names. And this is just one of the "wars" in DNS history. We will talk more about this in the next article.

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Source: habr.com