This page was last updated December 15, 2000

The current version of NonSequitur is 0.9

NonSequitur is an RFC 1034 and 1035 compliant domain name server for the Mac OS. It runs on Macs with a 68020 or greater processor, and native on Power Macs. NonSequitur requires either MacTCP 2.0.6 or Open Transport 1.1.2 (or later) to run.

Released March 1st, 1999

We believe 0.9 to be the most stable version of NonSequitur ever released.

All NonSequitur users running older versions are strongly encouraged to upgrade.

You can download NonSequitur from this server.

NonSequitur 0.9 is a significant upgrade from 0.8.x and contains many internal changes as well as several visible new features.

• Open Transport native — NonSequitur 0.9 uses the native Open Transport APIs, which provide a significant performance improvement compared to 0.8.x, especially on Power Macs. NonSequitur 0.9 requires Open Transport 1.1.2 or later, but will still work with MacTCP 2.0.6. NonSequitur has been tested on all versions of Open Transport from 1.1.2 to 2.6.3.

• Linebreak agnostic — NonSequitur 0.9 can process files with Unix, Mac, or DOS linebreaks.

• Error Reporting — The code that reads zone files and interprets them has been completely rewritten. Any errors found while processing these files are reported in the Errors window.

• More BIND-like file handling — NonSequitur 0.9 has a different method for loading its zone files, detailed below, that is more similar—but not identical—to how UNIX BIND does it.

• Remembers window positions — NonSequitur 0.9 now remembers the positions of its windows across launches.

• Miscellaneous bug fixes — Among other fixes, NonSequitur 0.9 is no longer susceptible to locking up the server machine when confronted with certain types of malformed request.

Some things have not changed:

• NonSequitur does not support recursion (and therefore does not support caching) — This means that most DOS/Windows PCs will not be happy using a NonSequitur-based server as their main server, since most PC IP protocol stacks and their domain name resolvers apparently rely on the domain name server to query other servers to resolve queries. Neither MacTCP nor Open Transport have this limitation.

  Since NonSequitur doesn’t cache, it is not susceptible to DNS spoofing attacks.

• NonSequitur can’t be used as a secondary name server — it can only be used as a primary name server. However, any server capable of acting as a secondary, such as UNIX’s BIND, should have no problem retrieving the relevant information from a NonSequitur server.

  It’s quite possible to set up a “manual” secondary DNS scheme by keeping copies of the same zone information on two separate machines running NonSequitur. If you do this, you must be very careful to always update both sets of files any time you make a change.

• It still costs nothing — NonSequitur remains copyrighted freeware.

The Read Me accompanying NonSequitur contains quick-start information, as well as migration info for current 0.8.x and MacDNS users.

If you’ve never used NonSequitur before, getting up and running is straightforward. NonSequitur reads domain information from standard BIND-format text files. If you are not familiar with this format, you should see the DNS for Mac OS page.

If you are looking for more information than that, we enthusiastically recommend the book DNS and BIND, now in its 3d edition. It explains the BIND file format in addition to many, many other things about how DNS works. If you plan on running a DNS, you really should buy this book.

Finally, we feel quite strongly that everyone who uses—or intends to use—NonSequitur should read RFC 1912. This RFC contains a great deal of useful information that is likely to save DNS administrators much frustration as well as thwart possible mishaps while setting up domain name services.

With the 0.9 release of NonSequitur we launched two NonSequitur-related mailing lists:

• nonsequitur-talk is intended as a general discussion list about NonSequitur. In light of NonSequitur’s sparse documentation, we hope that many of the requests that we receive and simply don’t have time to answer in detail, e.g. for help getting a new domain up and running, will be answered by the more knowledgeable subscribers on this list.

  We’d like to encourage users with questions to post them to nonsequitur-talk first, instead of immediately sending them to either of the feedback email addresses listed in the documentation. Bugs and specific feature-requests, however, should still be sent directly to the appropriate addresses.

  Subscribe to

• nonsequitur-announce is a broadcast list exclusively for NonSequitur-related announcements, such as new releases.

  If you subscribe to -talk, you don’t need to subscribe to -announce as well.

  Subscribe to