Name Server Daemon (NSD) by NLnet Labs

Welcome to the documentation of the NLnet Labs Name Server Daemon (NSD), an authoritative DNS name server. It has been developed for operations in environments where speed, reliability, stability and security are of high importance.

NSD is designed with a pure philosophy that prioritises raw performance. This means that if you serve hundreds of thousands or even millions of queries per second, NSD is the leading implementation in the world. This authoritative DNS name server strives to be a reference implementation for emerging standards of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). NSD is distributed free of charge in open source form under the BSD license. For most platforms, packages are available.

This documentation is an open source project maintained by NLnet Labs. is edited via text files in the reStructuredText markup language and then compiled into a static website/offline document using the open source Sphinx and ReadTheDocs tools.

We always appreciate your feedback and improvements. You can submit an issue or pull request on the GitHub repository, or post a message on the NSD users mailing list. All the contents are under the permissive Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC-BY 3.0) license, with attribution to NLnet Labs.

Getting Started

• Installation
  • Introduction
  • Installing with a package manager
  • Building from source
  • Testing
• Configuration
  • The configuration file
  • Setting up a secondary zone
  • Remote controlling NSD
  • Starting up the first time
• Zonefile example
  • Creating a zone
• Catalog zones
  • Setting up NSD as a catalog consumer
  • Using nsd-control to get catalog zone status
  • Setting up NSD as a catalog producer

Running

• Logging
• Using Transaction Signature (TSIG)
• Zone Expiry of Secondary Zones
• Interfaces
• Tuning
  • Processor Affinity
  • Partition Sockets
  • Bind to Device
  • Combining Options

Manual Pages

• nsd(8)
• nsd-checkconf(8)
• nsd-checkzone(8)
• nsd.conf(5)
• nsd-control(8)

Reference

• Configure Options
• Diagnosing NSD Log Entries