NSD For Linux

NSD (Name Server Daemon) is an open source and freely distributed command-line software written in C and engineered to implement an authoritative only, complete, simple and high performance DNS (Domain Name System) server on Linux kernel-based operating systems.

It is a modern, fast and RFC-compliant name server solution that is very well tested at the NLnet Labs. When comparing NSD with BIND, it was discovered that there are no interoperability issues for the two domain name resolvers.

Being a command-line software, NSD comes with various options, among which we can mention the ability to only listen to IPv4 or IPv6 connections, listen to specific incoming IP addresses and ports, read a custom configuration files instead of the default one, as well as to specify a database to load, the identity when querying for id.server CHAOS TXT, the NSID or log file.

It’s possible to specify the number of servers to start, the maximum number of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) connections per server, the PID file to write, the port to listen to, or the verbosity level, change root to specified folder when the program starts or change effective UID to a specific user.

To install the latest version of NSD on your GNU/Linux operating system, you must download the source archive (tarball) from Softpedia or the official website of the project, save it on your computer, extract its contents, and open your favorite terminal emulator application.

In the Linux Terminal app, use the ‘cd’ command to navigate to the location of the extracted archive files and run the ‘./configure && make’ command to optimize and compile the program for a specific hardware architecture (32-bit and 64-bit are supported at this time).

After a successful compilation, you will be able to install NSD system wide, use the ‘make install’ command as root or the ‘sudo make install’ command. To view its usage message, type the ‘nsd --help’ command in the terminal emulator window.

More documentation, as well as a memory consumption test are available at http://www.nlnetlabs.nl/projects/nsd/documentation.html. A regression tests report has been made available on the project’s homepage.