DNS on Windows Server 2003, 3rd Edition

The History of the Microsoft DNS Server

The first implementation of the Domain Name System was called JEEVES, written by Paul Mockapetris himself. A later implementation was BIND, an acronym for Berkeley Internet Name Domain, written by Kevin Dunlap for BSD 4.3 Unix. BIND is now maintained by the Internet Software Consortium.^[3]

Although the Microsoft DNS Server can read BIND’s configuration and datafiles, it is not BIND. Microsoft wrote its server from scratch, according to the DNS specifications. The first version of the Microsoft DNS Server was a beta version that ran on Windows NT 3.51. Microsoft made it available for some time from one of its FTP servers. The first product version of the DNS Server was shipped with Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 (but not with NT Workstation 4.0). The DNS server shipped with Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 comes from the same code base as the Windows NT DNS server—it’s really just a later version.

There are other name servers that run on Windows. For example, the Internet Software Consortium distributes free ports of BIND, including 9.2.2 (the latest released version as of this writing), which run on Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows Server 2003 (see ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/bind/contrib/).

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^[3] For more information on the Internet Software Consortium and its work on BIND, see http://www.isc.org/bind.html.