BIND on Win2K or NT

The Internet Software Consortium (ISC) provides separate BIND source codes for each major platform (e.g., Windows NT, Linux). Before you use BIND, you must use a C compiler to compile BIND on your chosen platform. However, the ISC provides compiled binaries of BIND 8.2.4 for Windows 2000 and NT, so you don't need to use Visual C++ (VC++) to compile the BIND source code when you use it on Win2K or NT. You can simply download the BIND 8.2.4 binaries and tools (at http://www.isc.org/products/BIND/bind8.html) to an empty directory on the Win2K or NT machine that you plan to use as a BIND DNS server. Then, execute BINDInstall, which installs BIND as a service on the system. BINDInstall places all BIND-related files in the directory C:\winnt\system32\dns\bin. The exception is libbind.dll, which the program places in C:\winnt\system32.

Before you start the BIND service, you need to create the configuration file named.conf in the directory C:\winnt\system32\dns\etc. You can use a text editor, such as Notepad, to create this file. You can put the forward- and reverse-lookup zone files of the domains and networks that the BIND server will serve in any directory, but you need to define the path of the zone files in named.conf. Whenever you change named.conf or any zone files, you must reload or restart the BIND service so that it loads the update to the cache. (However, you don't need to reload or restart a dynamic DNS—DDNS—enabled zone after a DDNS client—such as a Win2K computer, a Win2K DHCP server, or the Nsupdate tool—updates a record.) You can then start the BIND service. You can use BINDCtrl (a BIND service-control GUI utility that you can start from a command prompt) to manage the service (e.g., start, stop, reload, dump the database, make log queries).

At the time of this writing, the ISC didn't yet provide platform-specific make and include files for BIND 9 (for updated information, go to http://www.isc.org/products/BIND/bind9.html). Instead, you need a UNIX system with an ANSI C compiler, such as the GNU Project's GNU Compiler Collection (GCC—a free C compiler that you can download from http://www.gnu.org/directory/gcc.html), to build BIND 9 executables and compile configuration and make files. (According to the ISC, successful BIND 9.2.0 RC2 builds have been tested on Win2K and NT.)

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