[Pdns-announce] Pre-release of 3.1 available: Authoritative Serving, Windows, Complete IPv6 support, Bugs Fixed

[bert hubert]

Hi everybody,

I'm trying to get 3.1 out of the door in the coming days, so now is a good
time to test. From this pre-release up to 3.1 only bugs will be fixed, if
any.

Tar.gz, zip, .rpm, .deb and .exe (!) available on:

                      http://svn.powerdns.com/3.1-pre1/

This version has been pounded with 1.5 billion queries in a single run and
it survived just fine.

Release notes in text form below, with clickable links to the relevant
change sets: http://doc.powerdns.com/changelog.html#CHANGELOG-RECURSOR-3-1

After version 3.0.1 has proved to hold up very well under tremendous
loads, 3.1 adds important new features:

  * Ability to serve authoritative data from 'BIND' style zone files
    (using auth-zones statement).

  * Ability to forward domains so configured to external servers (using
    forward-zones).

  * Possibility of 'serving' the contents of /etc/hosts over DNS, which is
    very well suited to simple domestic router/DNS setups. Enabled using
    export-etc-hosts.

  * As recommended by recent standards documents, the PowerDNS recursor is
    now authoritative for RFC-1918 private IP space zones by default
    (suggested by Paul Vixie).

  * Full outgoing IPv6 support (off by default) with IPv6 servers getting
    equal treatment with IPv4, nameserver addresses are chosen based on
    average response speed, irrespective of protocol.

  * Initial Windows support, including running as a service ('NET START
    "POWERDNS RECURSOR"'). rec_channel is still missing, the rest should
    work. Performance appears to be below that of the UNIX versions, this
    situation is expected to improve.

Bug fixes:

  * No longer send out SRV and MX record priorities as zero on big-endian
    platforms (UltraSPARC). Discovered by Eric Sproul, fixed in commit
    773.

  * SRV records need additional processing, especially in an Active
    Directory setting. Reported by Kenneth Marshall, fixed in commit 774.

  * The root-records were not being refreshed, which could lead to
    problems under inconceivable conditions. Fixed in commit 780.

  * Fix resolving domain names for nameservers with multiple IP addresses,
    with one of these addresses being lame. Other nameserver
    implementations were also unable to resolve these domains, so not a
    big bug. Fixed in commit 780.

  * For a period of 5 minutes after expiring a negative cache entry, the
    domain would not be re-cached negatively, leading to a lot of
    duplicate outgoing queries for this short period. This fix has raised
    the average cache hit rate of the recursor by a few percent. Fixed in
    commit 783.

  * Query throttling was not aggressive enough and not all sorts of
    queries were throttled. Implemented in commit 786.

  * Fix possible crash during startup when parsing empty configuration
    lines (commit 807).

  * Fix possible crash when the first query after wiping a cache entry was
    for the just deleted entry. Rare in production servers. Fixed in
    commit 820.

  * Recursor would send out differing TTLs when receiving a misconfigured,
    standards violating, RRSET with different TTLs. Implement fix as
    mandated by RFC 2181, paragraph 5.2. Reported by Stephen Harker
    (commit 819).

Improvements:

  * ANY queries are now implemented as in other nameserver
    implementations, leading to a decrease in outgoing queries. The RFCs
    are not very clear on desired behaviour, what is implemented now saves
    bandwidth and CPU and brings us in line with existing practice.
    Previously ANY queries were not cached by the PowerDNS recursor.
    Implemented in commit 784.

  * rec_control was very sparse in its error reporting, and user
    unfriendly as well. Reported by Erik Bos, fixed in commit 818 and
    commit 820.

  * IPv6 addresses were printed in a non-standard way, fixed in commit
    788.

  * TTLs of records are now capped at two weeks, commit 820.

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