[Pdns-users] PowerDNS 2.9.17 released / year in review

[bert hubert]

Available on http://www.powerdns.com/downloads/ (deb, rpm, tar.gz) 
Source: http://downloads.powerdns.com/releases/pdns-2.9.17.tar.gz

Well, what can I say. This release follows almost a year after the previous
one. It has been a big year for PowerDNS, short on releases but long on
deployments.

Various companies, both large, very large (million+ domains), and small (you
know who you are!) have moved to PowerDNS. Furthermore, at least one
additional TLD (.mp) has joined the ranks of database powered DNS.

Version 2.9.16 was downloaded 6000 times as tar.gz, 3000 times as the static
DEB, 3500 times as an RPM. 

But the bigger news imho is the larger community involvement. Substantial
improvements have been made due to committed users filling out tickets on
the (temporary) bug filing system:
              http://ds9a.nl/cgi-bin/cvstrac/pdns/rptview?rn=4

The program behind this, cvstrac, has helped move PowerDNS development to a
new level. Expect this to improve even further, directly after this release
we will move to Subversion and 'trac', which have even more useful features.

This year we also say goodby to Wichert Akkerman as our Debian maintainer
and welcome Matthijs Mohlmann as his successor. Wichert, many thanks!
Matthijs has already been busy, so things are looking good.

I also want to thank the anonymous donors of an UltraSparc, there are no
real excuses left for our poor Solaris support anymore :-) 

I hope to keep the PowerDNS train moving along, please all test this release
and let me know how it works for you!

Ok, after this sort of Oscar acceptance speech, the meat of this
announcement:

   The 'million domains' release - PowerDNS has now firmly established itself
   as a major player with the unofficial count (ie, guesswork) now at over
   two million PowerDNS domains! Also, the GeoBackend has been tested by a
   big website and may soon see wider deployment. Thanks to Mark Bergsma for
   spreading the word!

>  It is also a release with lots of changes and fixes. Take care when
>  deploying!

   Security issues:

     * PowerDNS could be temporarily DoSed using a random stream of bytes.
       Reported cause of this has been fixed.

   Enhancements:

     * Reported version can be changed, or removed - see the "version-string"
       setting.

   Bug fixes:

     * NAPTR records can now be slaved, patch by Lorens Kockum.

     * GMySQL now works on Solaris

     * PowerDNS could be confused by questions with a %-sign in them - fixing
       cvstrac ticket #16 (reported by dilinger at voxel.net)

     * Duplicate MX records are now no longer considered duplicate if their
       priorities differ.

     * An authentication bug in the webserver was possibly fixed, please
       report if you were suffering from this. Being unable to authenticate
       to the webserver was what you would've noticed.

     * Fix for cvstrac ticket #2, PowerDNS could lose sync when sending out a
       very large number of notifications. Excellent bug report by Martin
       Hoffman, who also improved our original bugfix.

     * Fix the oldest PowerDNS bug in existence - under some circumstances,
       PowerDNS would log to syslog one character at a time. This was cvstrac
       ticket #4

     * HINFO records can now be slaved, fixing cvstrac ticket #8.

     * pdns_recursor could block under some circumstances, especially in case
       of corrupt UDP packets. Reported by Wichert Akkerman. Fix by
       Christopher Meer. This was cvstrac ticket #13.

     * Large SOA serial numbers would sometimes be logged as a signed
       integer, leading to negative numbers in the log.

     * PowerDNS now fully supports 32 bit SOA serial numbers (thanks to Mark
       Bergsma), closing cvstrac ticket #5.

     * pdns_recursor --local-address help text was wrong.

     * Very devious bug - PowerDNS did not clear its cache before sending out
       update notifications, leading slaves to conclude there was no update
       to AXFR. Excellent debugging by mkuchar at wproduction.cz.

     * Probably fixed cvstrac ticket #26, which caused pdns_recursor to fail
       on recent FreeBSD 5.3 systems. Please check, I have no such system to
       test on.

     * Geobackend did not get built for Debian.


-- 
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