[Pdns-announce] PowerDNS Recursor 3.1.2 Release Candidate 1, please consider testing

[bert hubert]

Hi PowerDNS People,

While version 3.1.1 has pleased many users, among them some of the largest
providers on the internet, it turned out to contain too many potentially bad
bugs. Furthermore, the same went for 3.1.

Every once in a while, we make a pre-release, or a release candidate. We ask
you to test these, in the hope that we can catch important bugs before
release. 

When in a prerelease of release candidate cycle, you can be sure we have the
resources to quickly deal with any problems. Once a version has been
released, and problems come in after two weeks, we may not have time.

So, please test 3.1.2-rc1, available on:

                     http://svn.powerdns.com/3.1.2-rc1/

Ok. Now for the real stuff. The same notes, but with clickable links, can be
found on: http://doc.powerdns.com/changelog.html

 Compared to 3.1.1, this release consists almost exclusively of bug-fixes
 and speedups. A quick update is recommended, as some of the bugs impact
 operators of authoritative zones on the internet. This version has been
 tested by some of the largest internet providers on the planet, and is
 expected to perform well for everybody.

 Bug-fixes:

   * Internal authoritative server did not differentiate between 'NXDOMAIN'
     and 'NXRRSET', in other words, it would answer 'no such host' when an
     AAAA query came in for a domain that did exist, but did not have an
     AAAA record. This only affects users with auth-zones configured.
     Discovered by Bryan Seitz, fixed in commit 848.

   * ANY queries for hosts where nothing was present in the cache would not
     work. This did not cause real problems as ANY queries are not reliable
     (by design) for anything other than debugging, but did slow down the
     nameserver and cause unnecessary load on remote nameservers. Fixed in
     commit 854.

   * When exceeding the configured maximum amount of TCP sessions, TCP
     support would break and the nameserver would waste CPU trying to
     accept TCP connections on UDP ports. Noted by Bryan Seitz, fixed in
     commit 849.

   * DNS queries come in two flavours: recursion desired and non-recursion
     desired. The latter is not very useful for a recursor, but is
     sometimes (erroneously) used by monitoring software or loadbalancers
     to detect nameserver availability. A non-rd query would not only not
     recurse, but also not query authoritative zones, which is confusing.
     Fixed in commit 847.

   * Everybody's favorite, when starting up under high load, a bogus line
     of statistics was sometimes logged. Fixed in commit 851.

   * Remove some spurious debugging output on dropping a packet by an
     unauthorized host. Discovered by Kai. Fixed in commit 854.

 Improvements:

   * Misconfigured domains, with a broken nameserver in the parent zone,
     should now work better. Changes motivated and suggested by Darren
     Gamble. This makes PowerDNS more compliant with RFC 2181 by making it
     prefer authoritative data over non-authoritative data. Implemented in
     commit 856.

   * PowerDNS can now listen on multiple ports, using the local-address
     setting. Added in commit 845.

   * A number of speedups which should have a noticeable impact,
     implemented in commits 850, 852, 853, 855

-- 
http://www.PowerDNS.com      Open source, database driven DNS Software 
http://netherlabs.nl              Open and Closed source services