Re: To the bind maintainer

[Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>]

Steve Greenland <stevegr@debian.org> writes:

> Actually, I'm kinda confused about all this talk about running BIND on
> personal machines (notebooks?) and by newbies. Why on earth would you
> run BIND on a notebook[1]? Why on earth would a (relatively) new Linux
> user have BIND installed? (Actually, now that I think about it, why is
> there a "task-name-server" package?)

All machines should run a named. It's a new phenomenon that lots of machines
on the net are windows or mac machines for which there just isn't a good name
server implementation. Previously name servers were largely only for serving
remote clients.

There's really little logical reason to use a dedicated machine set up to be a
name server for lots of machines when those machines are perfectly capable of
doing that work for themselves. On a slow dialup it might make sense to use a
forwarder to do the recursion on the other side of the slow connection, but at
56kbps that's not even a compelling reason, and at ISDN or ADSL speeds the
added latency reduced reliability makes it pointless.

I'm a little annoyed at the logic that seems to be at work here. We're
dummying down the average linux workstation with the argument that "if people
don't need it then they're better off not having it". That's misguided and
it's the kind of thinking that leads to Windows or Mac solutions where
everything looks really pretty but a lot of functionality isn't there when you
discover you do in fact need it.

-- 
greg