In Internet computing, NSD (for "name server daemon") is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...

Domain Name System The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned t ...

(DNS)

server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...

. It was developed by

NLnet Labs NLnet Labs is a network research laboratory founded in Amsterdam in 1999 by the board members of NLnet The NLnet Foundation supports organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. It was influential in spreading the ...

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban ar ...

in cooperation with the

RIPE NCC RIPE NCC (''Réseaux IP Européens'' Network Coordination Centre) is the regional Internet registry (RIR) for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia. Its headquarters are in Amsterdam, Netherlands, with a branch office in Dubai, UAE. ...

, from scratch as an authoritative name server (i.e., not implementing the recursive caching function by design). The intention of this development is to add variance to the "gene pool" of DNS implementations used by higher level name servers and thus increase the resilience of DNS against software flaws or exploits. NSD uses

BIND BIND () is a suite of software for interacting with the Domain Name System (DNS). Its most prominent component, named (pronounced ''name-dee'': , short for ''name daemon''), performs both of the main DNS server roles, acting as an authoritative ...

-style zone-files (zone-files used under BIND can usually be used unmodified in NSD, once entered into the NSD configuration). NSD uses zone information compiled via zonec into a binary database file (nsd.db) which allows fast startup of the NSD name-service daemon, and allows syntax-structural errors in Zone-Files to be flagged at compile-time (before being made available to NSD service itself). The collection of programs/processes that make-up NSD are designed so that the NSD daemon itself runs as a non-privileged user and can be easily configured to run in a

Chroot jail A chroot on Unix and Unix-like operating systems is an operation that changes the apparent root directory for the current running process and its children. A program that is run in such a modified environment cannot name (and therefore normall ...

, such that security flaws in the NSD daemon are not so likely to result in system-wide compromise as without such measures. As of May, 2018, four of the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...

root nameserver A root name server is a name server for the root zone of the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. It directly answers requests for records in the root zone and answers other requests by returning a list of the authoritative name servers f ...

s are using NSD: * k.root-servers.net was switched to NSD on February 19, 2003. * One of the 2 load-balanced servers for h.root-servers.net (called "H1", "H2") was switched to NSD, and now there are 3 servers all running NSD (called "H1", "H2", "H3"). * l.root-servers.net switched to NSD on February 6, 2007. * d.root-servers.net was switched to NSD in May 2018. Several other TLDs use NSD for part of their servers.

References

External links

* {{official website
NSD License

DNS software Free network-related software DNS server software for Linux Software using the BSD license

See also

References

External links