BIND 9 patch


Overview

The mDNkit provides a patch file for BIND 9. This patch file enables some of the tools included in BIND 9 to support multilingual domain names.

Instructions to apply this patch to BIND 9 are given at the beginning of the patch file. Refer also to the section "Applying and Installing the BIND 9 Patch" of the Installation Guide.

The BIND 9 patch in this version is significantly different from the previous version (mDNkit version 1). Users of the previous version need to read the section Differences from the Previous Version.


Tool Correction Contents

Inquiry tools, dig, host, and nslookup commands are attached to BIND 9. By applying BIND 9 patch, these tools become able to support multilingual domain names. Specifically, the following functions are added.

However, if environment variable MDN_DISABLE was defined, these functions are not performed, but perform as same as when BIND 9 patch was not applied.

The encoding and the normalization scheme for names to be used by the resolver or DNS server should first be specified in the configuration file. Refer to mDNkit resolver configuration for information about the setting method of this file.


Differences from the Previous Version

In the previous version (mDNkit version 1), the BIND 9 patch provides the following functions.

In mDNkit version 2, however, those functions are deleted from BIND 9 patch. This is because IDNA architecture is adopted. In this architecture, the application layer is supposed to perform normalization (NAMEPREP) and conversion to ACE. Since the multilingual domain names converted to ACE have the correct format as a conventional ASCII domain name, the resolver and DNS server can use those without modification.

mDNkit version 2 provides the API used to process normalization or encoding conversion by the application based on IDNA. For details, refer to Multilingual Domain Name Conversion API.