Berkeley Internet Name Domain
BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) Server is the standard and widely used Domain Name System Protocol Application developed by the University of California, Berkeley, which provides an open and freely redistributable reference implementation of the major components of the Domain Name System. It provides approximately 80% of all DNS services and it is free and available under ISC License, a BSD style license.[1]
Purpose of the BIND Project
The BIND Project was implemented in order to implement a standard process in naming and locating the different types of objects and resources in the internet such as user mail box, host address and server port under the UNIX operating system and to allow transparency in the computing environment.[2]
History
Graduate students from the University of California at Berkeley started the BIND Project, which received partial sponsorship from the the US Defense Advance Research Project Administration. Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle and Songnian Zhou collaborated in writing the first BIND and the project was monitored by the Naval Electronics System Command. The first BIND server was written by the team using the C programming language, which runs on a 4.2 BSD UNIX.[3]
Between 1985-1987, Kevin Dunlap, an employee of the Digital Equipment Corporation, worked on the BIND Project under the Computer Systems Research Group at UC Berkeley. He wrote the BIND version 4.3BSD.[4] This version was released by Berkeley Software Distribution as an free and open source software.
BIND Maintenance
The CSRG maintained BIND version 4.3BSD through 4.8.3. Many other individuals contributed in developing the BIND Server which include Ralph Campbell, Kevin Dunlap Doug Kingston, Craig Partridge, Smoot Carl-Mitchell, Mike Muuss, Jim Bloom and Mike Schwartz. The maintenance of BIND was eventually designated to Mike Karels and O. Kure. Hewlett Packard Company formerly known as Digital Equipment Corporation released BIND Versions 4.9 and 4.9.1 and Paul Vixie was delegated as the primary caretaker with assistance from 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 and Christophe Wolfhugel.[5]
Development of BIND Versions
Vixie Enterprises sponsored BIND Version 4.9.2 and Paul Vixie became the principal architect/programmer of BIND. The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) first sponsored version 4.9.3 and eventually continued the sponsorship for the development and maintenance of BIND versions.
On May 1997, Co-architect/programmers Bob Halley and Paul Vixie released BIND version 8, the first production-ready version of the BIND Project.
On September 2000, BIND version 9 was released. The development and maintenance of BIND version 9 is handled by ISC. At present, ISC only supports BIND version 9 which superseded the BIND versions 4 and 8.