current BIND status

Dear colleagues,

last week I helped trace back some DNS problems to (yet another) installation
of a bad early test version of BIND 4.9.2 (installed on a major server).
Unfortunately it seems that quite a lot of installations have picked up
broken test versions that were never intended for public distribution or use;
indeed archie indicates that that kind of bad software is carried by more
archive servers than the public beta or the recent "final" version (931205).
If you have published old versions of BIND 4.9.2 on your archive servers
I would like to encourage you very much to purge these ASAP to prevent
further spread of the broken software.

Below I include a short note about the current state of the 4.9.2 release
I wrote for a BIND source archive I maintain;  I explictly checked this
information with Paul Vixie.

If interested you can grab the current distribution kit from DEC WRL
(see below);  you also can use one of the European copies e.g.

	ftp://deins.Informatik.Uni-Dortmund.DE/DNS/src/bind/4.9.2-940221.tar.Z

(about 1.5 MByte).

Cheers,
  Ruediger


Ruediger Volk
Universitaet Dortmund, Informatik IRB
D-44221 Dortmund, Germany

E-Mail: rv at Informatik.Uni-Dortmund.DE
Phone:  +49 231 755 4760                 Fax:  +49 231 755 2386

================================================================================


BIND 4.9.2 versions		(Ruediger Volk  -940302-)
===================


Version  4.9.2-940221  of BIND is the best version so far;  it will be
declared the FINAL version of release 4.9.2;  all previous versions
of 4.9.2 were still test versions.  (see also note from Paul Vixie below)


In particular all previous versions of 4.9.2 include more bugs - and
some are really bad.
However a few problems with 4.9.2-940221 are still known, and a patch kit
is in preparation.

If you want a good and current BIND *now*,  you are advised to use
4.9.2-940221  but switch OFF the options  NCACHE and VALIDATE
(these are the areas of known or suspected bugs that can be dangerous).

Please GET RID of earlier versions of 4.9.2.  
(all versions prior to 931205 were ONLY intended for limited, controlled
use within the group of testers and developers;  4.9.2-931205  WITH
4.9.2-931205.patch01  applied was the public beta test version, and is
now succeeded by  4.9.2-940221.)



P.S.: I minor bug in the 4.9.2-940221 distribution kit is related to
      the included formatted documentation:  beware,  while the PostScript
      formatted version of the BIND Operations Guide  doc/bog/file.psf
      is current for 4.9.2,  doc/bog/file.psf is the ASCII formatted
      version from the previous release (4.9).


================================================================================

From: paul at vix.com (Paul A Vixie)
Subject: Re: Bind - 4.9.2
Date: 28 Feb 94 20:07:52 GMT
Organization: Vixie Enterprises

>  Can anyone tell me when the 4.9.2 version of Bind is expected to
>be realesed?

i'm going to declare the 4.9.2 on gatekeeper.dec.com:~ftp/pub/misc/vixie
(4.9.2-940221.tar.{gz,Z}) to be FINAL.  we're working on the first patch
now; it corrects the last bundle of small problems that couldn't be
frozen into 4.9.2 due to release synchronization schedules.