NSD is a name server implementation developed and maintained by NLnet Labs in cooperation with RIPE. NSD is an authoritative-only DNS implementation, and is memory efficient, secure and fairly straightforward.

NSD can start up quickly, as all zone information is compiled into an efficient binary format prior the the NSD daemon reading it. A few of the root nameservers use NSD, as well as the .se ccTLD. NSD has a proven history of being robust and can meet the demands of the highest-traffic DNS requirements known.

You can read more about NSD over at the project page (http://www.nlnetlabs.nl/projects/nsd/) so I won’t dwell on the preamble. My NSD implementation will run a master instance on server gooby and a slave instance on server dolan. There were a few pitfalls along the way, as this was my first NSD implementation. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be many NSD resources available on the internet, so I’ll include those pitfalls in this article and hopefully save you some of the time/pain/strace/bash -x that I had to indulge myself in. Both gooby and dolan are running a minimal package install of CentOS 6.3 x86_64.

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