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.

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.

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/RFCxxxx.txt

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

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

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.

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.

$ ./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).

$ 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.

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.)

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

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

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

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

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.