PowerDNS open source since 25th of November

[bert hubert]

I humbly  grovelingly like to point out here that PowerDNS, the database
(and ldap, perl, 'pipe' and bind zonefile) driven nameserver is open source.
I think it may be useful for many operators here, especially as PDNS is well
suited for 'BGP DNS' trickery. It is GPL licensed and is BIND compatible for
the majority of authoritative setups.

Many do not know this yet, probably in part due to the helpful moderators of
comp.protocols.dns.bind, the DNS operators newsgroup on usenet, who drop
messages about PowerDNS.

BIND compatible means that you can point PDNS at your named.conf and have a
working nameserver.

It goes beyond BIND in adding cool commands such as 'pdns_control
bind-list-rejects' that list all rejected zones, and the reason for their
rejection, and at which time this happened.

'bind-domain-status' is the command that can tell you at which point in time
all (or specific) zones were loaded, or a specific zone. 'bind-reload-now'
tells PowerDNS to reload a zone from disk NOW.

BIND mode is fast too, a Dutch ISP tested it with 56000 zones, some of which
with 100.000 records, and it launched in 75 seconds on commodity hardware.
Notably, PowerDNS answers questions while loading zones! It only answers
about those zones that have been loaded, however.

In database mode (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, DB2, ODBC) or in table mode
('XDB' - tridge DB, dbm, berkely db2) or in LDAP mode, there is no startup
time to speak of. In that case, the tool 'zone2sql' is provided to help with
migration, which you can simply point at your named.conf.

Other cool features, which are non-bin-dmode specific, include 'retrieve',
which causes PDNS to retrieve a domain from its master *immediately*.
Conversely, 'notify' causes PDNS to send out an immediate notification,
whether PDNS considers the domain changed or not. 'notify-host' can be used
to send a notification to a specific IP address, whether it is a master or
not.

The pipe-backend allows a coprocess (which accepts questions on stdin and
provides answers on stdout) written in any language to do dynamic
resolution, which is great for failover, loadbalancing or BGP DNS style
tricks. See http://doc.powerdns.com/pipebackend-dynamic-resolution.html

I invite you to check out http://doc.powerdns.com and
http://www.powerdns.com/downloads and http://www.powerdns.org. Sample
BIND-compatible pdns.conf is:

launch=bind
bind-config=/etc/bind/named.conf
master
slave


Thanks.

-- 
http://www.PowerDNS.com  Open source, database driven DNS Software 
http://lartc.org   Linux Advanced Routing  Traffic Control HOWTO
http://netherlabs.nl Consulting

Re: PowerDNS open source since 25th of November

[Pete Ehlke]

On Sat, Jan 04, 2003 at 01:40:42PM +0100, bert hubert wrote:
 
 Many do not know this yet, probably in part due to the helpful moderators of
 comp.protocols.dns.bind, the DNS operators newsgroup on usenet, who drop
 messages about PowerDNS.
 
c.p.d.b is not the DNS operator newsgroup, it's the BIND users
newsgroup. If promotional material for other implementations is rejected
by moderators, that's appropriate, imho.

You want comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains.

Re: PowerDNS open source since 25th of November

[Paul Vixie]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Pete Ehlke) writes:

  Many do not know this yet, probably in part due to the helpful
  moderators of comp.protocols.dns.bind, the DNS operators newsgroup on
  usenet, who drop messages about PowerDNS.
 
 c.p.d.b is not the DNS operator newsgroup, it's the BIND users
 newsgroup. If promotional material for other implementations is rejected
 by moderators, that's appropriate, imho.

actually, since it has a BIND-compatible mode, it's perfectly appropriate,
and in any case the only moderation which occurs is for spam rejection,
not content policing.  in any case i remember seeing the announcement, so
it must have been published somewhere.

 You want comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains.

sometimes the moderator of that forum tells us that BIND-specific issues do
not belong there.  it's possible that c.p.d.b is actually the right place
for powerdns-related discussions.
-- 
Paul Vixie