Brendan Oakley wrote: > I would rank our installation as large. Not large like eBay but larger > than average to be sure. I can testify that the performance of > PowerDNS with the BIND backend, when compared to BIND, at least in our > case, is astounding. When I replaced one particular BIND 9 server with > a PowerDNS server, the query counts on the mrtg graph nearly tripled. > It is simply faster at answering queries. There are some feature > limitations to PowerDNS, and I'm still working on a couple of issues > with it, but they all seem like things that can be worked out. Unlike > BIND, which for whatever reason (perhaps the relatively severe load we > place on our nameservers) just can't stay running and has to be > periodically restarted and occasionally rebooted, and exhibits other > inexplicable problems. > Hi Brendan,
Thanks for the feedback. We used to have a cron job running on our redhat dns servers to check them every 3 minutes and restart bind if it had died, which would happen several times a week. Since moving to suse in 2004, bind hasn't died (crosses fingers). Performance is not bad, once it's up and running - I clocked it at 28,000 queries/sec on our primary server. But bind does have issues, for instance, the fact that every time we restart it, it becomes fairly comatose and thrashes the CPU for about 5 minutes, while loading up all the zones: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~> rndc status number of zones: 6749 debug level: 0 xfers running: 0 xfers deferred: 0 soa queries in progress: 0 query logging is ON server is up and running [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~> And we have to restart it fairly often, just for routine changes, which gets old. It's tedious to make those changes too, since each hostname change involves editing a forward and reverse zone, and kicking the dns servers. Adding new zones involves a lot of manual labor too, as you might imagine. One main points of pdns which interested me is the sql back end, which promises greater manageability *if* we find some sort of tool which could serve as an administrative front end to that dns data. I've looked at a few, none of which worked for me, and wonder if I'll have to write my own. Sure, phpmyadmin can provide access to the data, but it's too raw and general, and not suited to a typical "dns administrator", and doing zone maintenance with mysql commands won't work for those folks. It seems that powerdns express is not available either. So, has anyone found a workable admin tool for pdns? Regards, Joe _______________________________________________ Pdns-users mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.powerdns.com/mailman/listinfo/pdns-users
