flyinweb's blog

Views in BIND 9

by Cricket Liu
05/14/2000

The view that computers on the Internet see is usually considerably stripped down from the internal version and only contains information about resources available on the Internet, including Web servers and mail servers. The internal view normally contains everything: all those hosts accessible from the Internet plus all those on the internal network.

Until recently, presenting one view of a zone to one community of hosts and another view to others has entailed running multiple sets of name servers or multiple name server processes on a single host in a tricky configuration. Nobody ever said being two-faced is easy.

BIND 9 introduced a new feature called "views" that makes delivering different versions of a zone, and even different name server configurations, easy. In this article, I'll describe how to use views to configure several two-faced name servers, each a little more complex than the last.