Installation

To install your own copy of NSD you have two options: use the version provided by your package manager, or download the source and building it yourself.

Installing via the package manager is the easiest option, and on most systems even trivial. The downside is the distributed version can be outdated for some distributions or not have all the compile-time options included that you want. Building and compiling NSD yourself ensures that you have the latest version and all the compile-time options you desire.

Introduction

NSD consists of two programs: the zone compiler zonec and the name server nsd itself. The name server works with an intermediate database prepared by the zone compiler from standard zone files.

For NSD operation this means that zones have to be compiled by zonec before NSD can use them. All this can be controlled via rc.d (SIGTERM, SIGHUP) or nsd-control, and uses a simple configuration file nsd.conf.

Installing with a package manager

Most package managers maintain a version of NSD, although this version can be outdated if this package has not been updated recently. If you like to upgrade to the latest version, we recommend compiling NSD yourself.

Debian/Ubuntu

Installing NSD with the built-in package manager should be as easy as:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nsd

This gives you a compiled and running version of NSD ready to be configured.

Building from source/Compiling

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

First of all, we need our copy of the NSD code. On our website you can find the latest version and the changelog. In this example we’ll use version 4.3.7. Please note that this is not the latest version currently.

wget https://nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/nsd/nsd-4.3.7.tar.gz
tar xzf nsd-4.3.7.tar.gz

We’ll need some tools, such as a compiler and the make program.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y build-essential

The library components NSD needs are: libssl and libevent, of which we need the “dev” version.

sudo apt install -y libssl-dev
sudo apt install -y libevent-dev

We’ll also need the tools to build the actual program. For this, NSD uses make and internally it uses flex and yacc, which we need to download as well.

sudo apt install -y bison
sudo apt install -y flex

With all the requirements met, we can now start the compilation process in the NSD directory. The first step here is configuring. With ./configure -h you can look at the extensive list of configurables for NSD. A nice feature is that configure will tell you what it’s missing during configuration.

./configure

If configure gives no errors, we can continue to actually try compiling NSD using make; compilation might take a while.

make

After successfully compiling, we can install NSD to make it available for the machine.

sudo make install

We now have fully compiled and installed version of NSD, and can continue to testing it.

Testing

A simple test to determine if the installation was successful is to invoke the nsd command with the -V option, which is the “version” option. This shows the version and build options used and proves installation was successful.

nsd -v

If all the previous steps were successful we can continue to configuring our NSD instance.

Another handy trick you can use during testing is to run NSD in the foreground using the -d option and increase the verbosity level using the -V 3 option. This allows you to see steps NSD takes and also where it fails.

Now that NSD is installed we can continue to configuring it.