Welcome to version 4.8 of bind. There have been several changes to the named boot file (/etc/named.boot) of which you should be aware. The "domain" line for each zone is no longer needed, but one such line may still be used to specify a default domain to be used for queries containing names with only a single component. The term "suffixes", which was added in version 4.7alpha, has been removed. The manual page on named (named.8) has been updated to reflect all these changes. Please read this and look at the example files before installation. You should also note the changes in the resolver code to support non-fully-qualified addresses and per-user host aliases. See hostname(7) for an overview. Two new routines have been added to the resolver library since the last test release: res_query formulates a query, sends it, waits for a response and does preliminary error checking; res_search implements the search rules of gethostbyname using res_query. The MX lookup routine in sendmail has been modified to use res_search. Also, dn_skip takes an additional parameter and has been renamed to dn_skipname. While old sendmail binaries will work with the new version of bind, because of these changes, it is desirable to install new sendmail sources and recompile sendmail. Do not rebuild sendmail from old sources. The new sendmail is on ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU for anonymous FTP from pub/4.3/sendmail.MX.tar and pub/4.3/sendmail.MX.tar.Z. There have been numerous changes to named, fixing most of the known bugs that can be fixed without major structural changes in the server. Several server configurations that failed before should now work. Certain robustness problems have been fixed, in particular bounds- checking when processing incoming packets. Two changes have been made in preparation for negative caching: SOA records are sent in the authority section in negative responses with NXDOMAIN set, and a bug was fixed that caused confusion and repeated requests if a response had no error, no answer and an SOA in the authority section. As such responses are already sent by other servers, and will be sent by the next release of BIND, it is important that all sites upgrade to this version as quickly as possible. The root "hint" cache and cache file remain the largest problem area, along with named's naivete in accepting bogus server's data. These will be addressed in the next release, along with asynchronous zone transfers, intelligent reloading of zone files, faster startup, and caching of negative responses. This version (4.8) will replace the last officially released version (4.5). Version 4.5 has a serious bug that causes the generation of a continuous stream of bogons to the root domain servers (bogus queries with the query response bit set and possibly garbage for nsid and rcode). It is imperative that these versions of named be replaced as fast as possible. We urge you to field 4.8 quickly, for the sake of the root domain servers. Mike Karels Jean Wood bind@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU