Linux

...or maybe I didn't word my post correctly... Thanks for the link.... I've been there...

I don't know whether you're mocking me in regards to google, or if you're beeing serious. Of course I've done my research - I'm just interested in hearing some testimonials from our peers here on TR. I know everybody has their favorites.

I thought you wanted instructions.

Tutorial links are welcome, but I know a bit already. I was simply interested in the pros and cons of the various distros and the newer versions of bind - I can read all I want, but nothing compares to hands on experience when we get into small bugs and annoyances that are related to a practical implementation.

We already have *nix dns servers in place, so don't worry about the how to's :)

I like Fedora 3, I installed it to our church's network and they have not had any issues comparing to Win2k. I love it and recommend it, hope this helps you out. Good luck.

...our most realistic option at this point; I've heard several great reviews, I already have a background with RedHat distros, and I have the disks at work ready to go.

I've been quoted a few organizations with a very large web presence who have moved to FC3 since it's release.

You really should shy away from Fedora-anything.
Fedora is meant as a cutting-edge development platform and should not be counted on for stability.
Consider Red Hat enterprise 3.0 or Debian. If you're really open minded I recommend FreeBSD for a really solid and stable product.
Anything older than bind 9.2.3 is going to be a problem since <=9.2.2 has security problems.

Slackware, mandrake, fedora they all make me cringe

First you're absolutely right about running the most up to date version of BIND. It's good advice for any software, particularly software that provides system services.

You may be right about Fedora. I thought that RH was using it as a free distro for home use.

However, when you recommended the other Unix variants you failed to take the requirement for ease of administration into account. The original post specifically asked for recommendations that are relatively easy to install and administer. The *BSD products are certainly well built. Many people also believe in the quality of Debian. But these are not easy to cut your teeth on so they do not meet the requirement of being easy to run.

Fedora is both the development testing platform for Red Hat and the "free home version" little brother of RHEL, and it is additionally the "community"-supported branching of the Red Hat line. Whereas Fedora has three testing standards of release stability, RHEL is all considered "stable". One of those three Fedora standards is also a "stable" form, however, and that should be reasonably usable for production environments. You might be surprised by the major projects using Fedora, in fact.

All that aside, however, there have been some issues with some Fedora releases. For instance, Fedora Core 2 suffered substantially from issues involving GRUB and LVM (if I recall correctly) not playing well with each other (though Mandrake and SuSE releases, rounding out the major RPM-based distributions, suffered the same problems to some degree at about the same time). There have been other issues as well, which may or may not be relevant.

I don't consider Fedora to be the stablest distribution, but it's not the most unstable, either. In fact, it seems to be somewhat middle-of-the-road. Mandrake tends to be less stable and Debian more stable. Any distribution that focuses on a featureful, hefty desktop implementation tends to lean a bit toward the "unstable" side, in comparison to distros that default to minimal installs instead.

Well. I'm rambling.

You can run a DNS server with a version of Linux, but DNS serving is the kind of stuff really handled well by the BSD's. In particular, I'd go with OpenBSD. Now if you intend to run the system on the desktop, that's an entirely different matter. Desktop Linux systems have it all over the BSD's for hardware support, ease of installation and overall ease of use. Linux systems aren't necessarily bad server systems, but OpenBSD has the best reputation of ANY network operating system, period.