[Pdns-announce] PowerDNS Recursor 3.1.4, second pre-release, please test!

[bert hubert]

Hi everybody,

In a few days we want to release version 3.1.4 of the PowerDNS recursor. If
you have any chance, please test the second prerelease to see if it works,
and if it solves any problems you may have been seeing.

Available at:
 http://svn.powerdns.com/snapshots/pdns-recursor-3.1.4-pre2.tar.bz2
 http://svn.powerdns.com/snapshots/pdns-recursor-3.1.4pre2-1.i386.rpm
 http://svn.powerdns.com/snapshots/pdns-recursor_3.1.4-pre2-1_i386.deb

Release notes:
 This is yet another release that mostly fixes minor issues. An upgrade is
 recommended, as the combined fixes improve the recursor considerably.

 Bugs:

   * On certain error conditions, PowerDNS would neglect to close a socket,
     which might therefore eventually run out. Spotted by Stefan Schmidt,
     fixed in commits 892, 897, 899.

   * Some nameservers (including PowerDNS in rare circumstances) emit a SOA
     record in the authority section. The recursor mistakenly interpreted
     this as an authoritative "NXRRSET". Spotted by Bryan Seitz, fixed in
     commit 893.

   * In some circumstances, PowerDNS could end up with a useless (not
     working, or no longer working) set of nameserver records for a domain.
     This release contains logic to invalidate such broken NSSETs, without
     overloading authoritative servers. This problem had previously been
     spotted by Bryan Seitz, 'Cerb' and Darren Gamble. Invalidations of
     NSSETs can be plotted using the "nsset-invalidations" metric,
     available through rec_control get. Implemented in commit 896 and
     commit 901.

   * PowerDNS could crash while dumping the cache using rec_control
     dump-cache. Reported by Wouter of WideXS and Stefan Schmidt and many
     others, fixed in commit 900.

   * Under rare circumstances (depleted TCP buffers), PowerDNS might send
     out incomplete questions to remote servers. Additionally, on
     big-endian systems (non-Intel and non-AMD generally), sending out
     large TCP answers questions would not work at all, and possibly crash.
     Brought to our attention by David Gavarret, fixed in commit 903.

   * The recursor contained the potential for a dead-lock processing an
     invalid domain name. It is not known how this might be triggered, but
     it has been observed by 'Cerb' on #powerdns. Several dead-locks where
     PowerDNS consumed all CPU, but did not answer questions, have been
     reported in the past few months. These might be fixed by commit 904.

 Improvements:

   * PowerDNS has support to drop answers from so called 'delegation only'
     zones. A statistic ("dlg-only-drops") is now available to plot how
     often this happens. Implemented in commit 890.

   * Hint-file parameter was mistakenly named "hints-file" in the
     documentation. Spotted by my Marco Davids, fixed in commit 898.

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