[Pdns-users] PowerDNS version 2.9.18 *almost* released

[testacc at xs4all.nl]

Hi Bert,

Very nice to see all these improvements !

I was searching for the same problem some time ago that Matthijs Mohlmann
had on a debian-sarge system, the only one that it had of three new
installed machines.

This machine didn't also want to run the PDNS-server for queries. PDNS did
ran when you did a "ps-aux" but the DNS-server was never authorative for
resolving domainnames.

1,5 week ago I had the solution found for it. I thought this was already
solved (at the debian side) so I didn't give any comment. I noticed that
Matthijs (my namebuddie) was almost on his own with this problem.

It's nice that it's solved in the newest release. If you want, I can give
some comments about how I solved the issue.

Regards,

Matthijs

> Hi people,
>
> I was planning to release 2.9.18 tonight but ran into too many
> technicalities, so I'm asking you all to test the release and yell loudly
> if
> they don't work on your system.
>
> The main thing that changed is that I'm now building on Ubuntu, and that
> we
> now depend on Boost. I expect to do the real release tomorrow, possibly
> just
> by making these files 'official'.
>
> The files to try are:
> 	http://ds9a.nl/pdns/pdns-2.9.18.tar.gz
> 	http://ds9a.nl/pdns/pdns-static-2.9.18-1.i386.rpm
> 	http://ds9a.nl/pdns/pdns-static_2.9.18-1_i386.deb
>
> Let me know how you fare, if things work as intended or not!
>
> Release notes, which are not expected to change:
>
>    The '8 million domains' release, which also marks the battle
>    readiness of the PowerDNS Recursor. The latest improvements
>    have been made possible by financial support and contributions
>    by Register.com and XS4ALL. Thanks!
>
>    This release brings a number of new features, but also has a
>    new build dependency, the Boost library.
>
>    Currently several big ISPs are evaluating the PowerDNS
>    recursor for their resolving needs, some of them have switched
>    already. In the course of testing, over 350 million actual
>    queries have been recorded and replayed, the answers turn out
>    to be satisfactorily.
>
>    This testing has verified that the pdns recursor, as shipped
>    in this release, can stand up to heavy duty ISP loads (over
>    20000 queries/second) and in fact does so better than major
>    other nameservers, giving more complete answers and being
>    faster to boot.
>
>    We invite ISPs who note recursor problems to record their
>    problematic traffic and replay it using the tools described in
>    Chapter 19 to discover if PowerDNS does a better job, and to
>    let us know the results.
>
>    In other news, the entire Wikipedia constellation now runs on
>    PowerDNS using the Geo Backend! Thanks to Mark Bergsma for
>    keeping us updated.
>
>    General bugs fixed:
>
>      * TCP authoritative server would not relaunch a backend
>        after failure (reported by Norbert Sendetzky)
>      * Fix backend restarting logic (reported, and fix suggested
>        by Norbert Sendetzky)
>      * Launching identical backends multiple times, with
>        different settings, did not work. Reported by Mario Manno.
>      * Questions from clients denied recursion could blank out
>        answers to clients who are allowed recursion services,
>        temporarily. Reported by Wilco Baan. This would've made it
>        possible for outsiders to blank out a domain temporarily
>        to your users. Luckily PowerDNS would send out SERVFAIL or
>        Refused, and not a denial of a domain's existence.
>      * Master/slave queries did not honour the
>        query-local-address setting. Spotted by David Levy of
>        Register.com. The fix also randomises the local port used,
>        slightly improving security.
>
>    Compilation fixes:
>
>      * Fix compile on Solaris, they define 'PC' for some reason.
>        Reported by Eric Yiu.
>      * PowerDNS recursor would not compile on FreeBSD due to
>        Linux specific defines, as reported in cvstrac ticket 26
>        (Ralf van der Enden)
>      * Several 64 bits issues have been fixed, especially in the
>        Logging subsystem.
>      * SSQLite would fail to compile on recent Debian systems
>        (Matthijs Mohlmann)
>      * Generic MySQL would not compile on 64-bit platforms.
>
>    Improvements:
>
>      * PowerDNS now reports stray command line arguments, like
>        when running '--local-port 5300' instead of
>        '--local-port=5300'. Reported by Christian Welzel.
>      * We now warn against erroneous logging-facility
>        specification, ie specifying an unknown facility.
>      * --version now outputs gcc version used, so we can tell
>        people 2.95 is no longer supported.
>      * Extended regression tests, moved them to the new 'sdig'
>        tool (see below).
>      * Bind2backend is now blazingly fast, and highly memory
>        efficient to boot. As a special bonus it can read gzipped
>        zones directly. The '.NET' zone is hosted using 401MB of
>        memory, the same size as the zone on disk.
>      * The Pipe Backend has been improved such that it can send
>        out different answers based on the IP address the question
>        was received ON. See Section A.1.1 for how this changed
>        the Pipe Backend protocol. Note that you need to set
>        pipebackend-abi-version to benefit from this change,
>        existing clients are not affected. Change and
>        documentation contributed by Marc Jauvin of Register4Less.
>      * LDAP backend has been updated (Norbert Sendetzky).
>
>    Recursor improvements and fixes. See Chapter 11 for details.
>    The changes below mean that all of the caveats listed for the
>    recursor have now been addressed.
>
>      * After half an hour of uptime, the entire cache would be
>        pruned for each packet, which is a tad slow. It now
>        appears the pdns recursor is among the faststest around.
>      * Under high loads, or when unlucky, some query mthreads
>        would get 'stuck', and show up in the statistics as
>        eternally running queries.
>      * Lots of redundant gettimeofday() and time() calls were
>        removed, which has resulted in a measurable speedup.
>      * pdns_recursor can now listen on several addresses
>        simultaneously.
>      * Now supports setuid and setgid operation to allow running
>        as a less privileged user (Bram Vandoren)
>      * Return code of pdns_recursor binary did not make sense
>        (Matthijs Mohlmann and Thomas Hood)
>      * Timeouts and errors are now split out in statistics.
>      * Many people reported broken statistics, it turned out that
>        no statistics were being reported if there had been no
>        questions to base them on. We now log a message to that
>        effect.
>      * Add query-local-address support, which allows the recursor
>        to send questions from a specific IP address. Useful for
>        anycast setups.
>      * Add outgoing TCP query support and proper truncated answer
>        support. Needed for Worldnic Denial of Service protection,
>        which sends out truncated packets to force clients to
>        connect over TCP, which prevents spoofing.
>      * Properly truncate our own answers.
>      * Improve our TCP answers by using writev, which is slightly
>        friendlier to the network.
>      * On FreeBSD, TCP errors could cause the recursor to exit
>        suddenly due to a SIGPIPE signal.
>      * Maximum number of simultaneous client TCP connections can
>        now be limited with the max-tcp-clients setting.
>      * Add agressive timeouts for TCP clients to make sure
>        resources are not wasted. Defaults to two seconds, can be
>        configured with the client-tcp-timeout setting.
>
>    Backend fixes:
>
>      * SQLite backend would not slave properly (Darron Broad)
>      * Generic MySQL would not compile on 64-bit platforms.
>
>    New technology:
>
>      * Added the new DNS parser logic, called MOADNSParser.
>        Completely modular, every memory access checked.
>      * 'sdig', a simple dig workalike with 'canonical' output,
>        which is used for the regression tests. Based on the new
>        DNS parser logic.
>      * dnswasher, dnsreplay and dnsscope, all DNS analysis tools.
>        See Chapter 19 for more details.
>      * Generic Oracle Backend, sponsored by Register.COM. See
>        Section A.5.3.
>
> --
> http://www.PowerDNS.com      Open source, database driven DNS Software
> http://netherlabs.nl              Open and Closed source services
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