Configuring BIND

The BIND DNS software from the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) is a popular open source DNS software, and can be used both as an authoritative DNS server, and a caching recursive DNS server.

When installed, the software comes pre-configured as a caching recursive DNS server, and the only configuration change that should be made is to disable QNAME minimization.

By default, BIND configuration files are located in /etc/bind. The main configuration file in this directory is named.conf. To disable QNAME minimization, add the following lines:

options {
    qname-minimization off;
}

Note that there is already likely to be an options block. In this case, just insert one line with qname-minimization in the existing options block. Some distributions put the options block in a separate configuration file, like named.conf.options. In that case, add the qname-minimization line to that file.