The first implementation of the Domain Name System was called JEEVES, written by Paul Mockapetris himself. A later implementation was BIND, an acronym for Berkeley Internet Name Domain, written for Berkeley’s 4.3BSD Unix operating system by Kevin Dunlap. BIND is now maintained by the Internet Software Consortium.[4]
Although the Microsoft DNS Server can read BIND’s configuration and data files, it is not BIND. Microsoft wrote its server from scratch, according to the DNS specifications. The first version of the Microsoft DNS Server was a beta version that ran on NT 3.51. Microsoft made it available for some time from one of its FTP servers. The first product version of the DNS server was shipped with Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 (but not with NT Workstation 4.0). The server was updated in several NT Service Packs, including the latest (as of this writing), Service Pack 6a. The DNS server shipped with Windows 2000 Server comes from the same code base as the NT DNS server—it’s really just a later version.
There are other name servers that run on Windows. For example, the Internet Software Consortium provides a free port of BIND 8.2.4, which runs on Windows NT and Windows 2000. Check Point offers a commercial version of the BIND 8.2.3 server. It also runs on both Windows NT and Windows 2000.
[4] For more information on the Internet Software Consortium and its work on BIND, see http://www.isc.org/bind.html.
Get DNS on Windows 2000, Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
