[Pdns-users] New to powerdns

[Sloan]

Brendan Oakley wrote:
> I would rank our installation as large. Not large like eBay but larger
> than average to be sure. I can testify that the performance of
> PowerDNS with the BIND backend, when compared to BIND, at least in our
> case, is astounding. When I replaced one particular BIND 9 server with
> a PowerDNS server, the query counts on the mrtg graph nearly tripled.
> It is simply faster at answering queries. There are some feature
> limitations to PowerDNS, and I'm still working on a couple of issues
> with it, but they all seem like things that can be worked out. Unlike
> BIND, which for whatever reason (perhaps the relatively severe load we
> place on our nameservers) just can't stay running and has to be
> periodically restarted and occasionally rebooted, and exhibits other
> inexplicable problems.
>   
Hi Brendan,

Thanks for the feedback. We used to have a cron job running on our
redhat dns servers to check them every 3 minutes and restart bind if it
had died, which would happen several times a week. Since moving to suse
in 2004, bind hasn't died (crosses fingers).

Performance is not bad, once it's up and running - I clocked it at
28,000 queries/sec on our primary server.

But bind does have issues, for instance, the fact that every time we
restart it, it becomes fairly comatose and thrashes the CPU for about 5
minutes, while loading up all the zones:

root at armitage:~> rndc status
number of zones: 6749
debug level: 0
xfers running: 0
xfers deferred: 0
soa queries in progress: 0
query logging is ON
server is up and running
root at armitage:~>

And we have to restart it fairly often, just for routine changes, which
gets old.

It's tedious to make those changes too, since each hostname change
involves editing a forward and reverse zone, and kicking the dns
servers. Adding new zones involves a lot of manual labor too, as you
might imagine.

One main points of pdns which interested me is the sql back end, which
promises greater manageability *if* we find some sort of tool which
could serve as an administrative front end to that dns data. I've looked
at a few, none of which worked for me, and wonder if I'll have to write
my own.

Sure, phpmyadmin can provide access to the data, but it's too raw and
general, and not suited to a typical "dns administrator", and doing zone
maintenance with mysql commands won't work for those folks. It seems
that powerdns express is not available either.

So, has anyone found a workable admin tool for pdns?

Regards,

Joe