DNS and BIND
by Paul Albitz, Cricket Liu · first published 1996
50% recommend45% neutral5% critical
Why HN recommends it
Reference guide to understanding DNS and running name servers. It covers troubleshooting DNS problems and operating your own servers, and is considered a classic on the subject.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
A complete guide to setting up and running a TCP/IP network for administrators. Covers Linux, BSD and System V TCP/IP implementations.
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
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DNS and Bind (now in its 3rd edition) by Liu, Albitz, and Loukides. It's an O'Reilly book. http://www.amazon.com/DNS-BIND-Cricket-Liu/dp/1565925122
on “Sysadmin mistakes start-ups make” ↗…was invalid was also provably valid, based on examples found within the RFC). But, this is the kind of silly stuff that I'm not talking about. Syntax is irrelevant to my suggestion that people read DNS and BIND. Oh, and Webmin handles serial numbers in BIND, in just about any format that is valid according to the RFC. Some others issues that I see people make: Incorrect NS, MX, etc. records. djbdns doesn't…
on “Sysadmin mistakes start-ups make” ↗There are very few generally useful books about system administration. DNS and BIND just happens to cover a subject that touches everything we do on the Internet; and covers topics that are often poorly understood, and difficult for most folks to get right through intuition and dumb…
on “Sysadmin mistakes start-ups make” ↗I disagree. Of all of these DNS & BIND is the one I've recommended the most over the years. So many people have no idea how DNS works, and so many of the online references are wrong or incomplete. I've worked in three major fields of IT over the past 20 years, and in all of them, DNS has been the cause of more problems than any other single category. And, in this case, DNS & BIND is one of the gr
on “Humble Book Bundle: Unix” ↗Totally agree, DNS and Bind and Essential System Administration alone are completely worth it if you're at all interested in (using) Unix-like systems. As for being dated, I think simply reading (and understanding) Essential System…
on “Humble Book Bundle: Unix” ↗It was a whole zoo of O'Reilly books, including UNIX Systems Administration The Perl Cookbook DNS and BIND AWK and too late for me to learn the basic, but valuable nonetheless: The Practice of System and Network Administration.
on “Ask HN: Which book/site you learned the most basics of your field?” ↗DNS and Bind by Cricket Liu is the classic one.
on “DNS alias mode (2020)” ↗O'Reilly's DNS and Bind is the book for you. O'Reilly has several books on Apache as well, for information about web server security.
on “Ask HN: what's a good resource or book to learn domain management” ↗…step. The monitoring should notify you if any of the name servers are unresponsive, or return a different response than what's expected. If you'd like to dig into the details of DNS, then O'Reilly's "DNS and BIND" is highly recommended, even if you're not using BIND. There are a number of quality hosting providers out there. A rule of thumb that I use is this: If a DNS hosting provider doesn't eat their own dog…
on “DNS Outage at DigitalOcean” ↗What a great book! I wish they'd publish a new edition (the latest was ten years ago). Has anything as good been released since? What is the current "standard reference" on DNS and BIND?
on “DNS: Basic Concepts (2013)” ↗…your entire business is on the web. Understanding DNS is pretty fundamental to troubleshooting and avoiding problems with network service. In fact, when people ask me to recommend books the O'Reilly DNS and BIND book is always at the top of the list. DNS is important enough that you should spend at least an hour a year thinking about it.
on “Ask YC: Who are you using for DNS?” ↗…type of problem we hear about (trailing well-behind email, but well before PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, performance, security, and pretty much everything else). I pretty much expect to recommend O'Reilly's DNS and BIND daily, and keep the BIND page of our wiki open at all times for referencing in my responses.
on “Ask HN: Web Fundamentals for a Newb” ↗I've run my own DNS servers since the mid 90's. Anyone doing this should check out the "DNS and BIND" O'Reilly book.
on “How and why I run my own DNS servers” ↗K&R, Spivak, Randal's Learning Perl, Cricket's DNS and Bind, Petzold's Windows Programming Flipping through the Smalltalk books was an eye-opener back in the day. There's an amazing but little-known book in the same printing style as K&R about systems software…
on “Ask HN: What, in your opinion, are the greatest and most useful textbooks?” ↗I've been running BIND at home since the mid 90's when I had ISDN. The O'Reilly "DNS and BIND" book was my go-to guide when I got started.
on “My Own DNS Server at Home – Part 1: IPv4” ↗