Internet Software

The main software infrastructure of the Internet comes down to a handful of projects, most of which are 'old code' and are arguably pass their sell by date. I have compiled a list of current 'standard' software and have suggested more worthy replacements.

BIND ( DNS )

Probably the most famous and important piece of software on the Internet. Before BIND, dns resolution was done using /etc/hosts tables that were ftp'ed around on a nightly basis! Written by Paul Vixie of the ISC. It cannot be stressed enough how important DNS resolution is, if you cannot trust the DNS service, any or all of your traffic could be intercepted. Forget online banking/shopping. Forget secure logins of other machines. A broken DNS service means a broken Internet :(
BIND has a long history of security problems. BIND 4 was replaced by BIND 8 which is recently being fazed out in favour of BIND 9. Each major version claimed to be better/more secure but have failed miserably. You have been warned, you use BIND at your own risk!

DJBDNS
Homepage | Freshmeat

Written by the (in)famous Dan Berstein, it is a fast and secure alternative and provides full DNS capabilities.

maraDNS
Homepage | Freshmeat

This is sweet! An amazingly fast and secure DNS cache, with full dns capabilites in development.

INN ( NNTP )

Not used as much today due to the astounding demands that a nntp service requires. Another ISC project :( It has had its share of security problems although most people will have dropped it due to performance reasons.

nntpcache
Homepage | Freshmeat

A caching NNTP server which is ideal as a reader server. Makes good use of available bandwidth by pulling articles from a full feed as they are requested by users. Requires an upsream full feed server.

Diablo
Homepage | Freshmeat

A fast, efficient, secure full feed NNTP server. Written by Matt Dillon.

Sendmail ( SMTP )

Still shipped as standard with most unices. Security faults in sendmail were responsible for the very first Internet worm!

Postfix
Homepage | Freshmeat

Written by Wietse Venema, it is a full feature SMTP server with good controls for spam etc.

Qmail
Homepage | Freshmeat

Another Dan Berstein piece of software with his usual high standards of coding. It is a lightweight, secure, fully feature SMTP server. There is a huge amount of plugin software for it to enhance its capabilities to support LDAP, spam filtering etc etc.

DHCP ( DHCP/BOOTP )

More ISC software :(

Apache ( HTTP )

The web's favorite http server, and with good cause! Although Apache is without doubt the most feature packed and stable it has had a couple of security problems. Use the 2.x family as it is faster.

thttpd
Homepage | Freshmeat

A simple, small, secure and fast web server with built-in throttle capabilites.

wu.ftpd ( FTP )

Still shipped by some unix vendors it has a history of security problems.

pureftp
Homepage | Freshmeat

A fully standards conformant, small, fast, and secure FTP server.

xntpd ( NTP )

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