[Pdns-users] PowerDNS newuser, migrating from BIND sdb dlz

[Scott Haneda]

Hello, I was pointed to this software from a kind person on the BIND  
list.

A client of mine has needs to support 100K's of domains backed by  
MySql.  Previously, they were using BIND and text files. Performance,  
maintenance, and records keeping was a nightmare.

I installed named-sdb on their Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release  
5.3 (Tikanga)
Linux 2.6.18-128.el5 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

As far as I can tell, the only option for this is:
http://people.redhat.com/atkac/bind/bind-9.6.0-2.P1.fc11.src.rpm
aside from hand compiling, which would not build well.

This has only been deployed in testing.  Current issues are that named- 
sdb goes deaf or crashes with core dumps.  I tested BIND DLZ on Mac OS  
X and it performed well, though the client wanted to deploy on RHEL,  
which seems to have issues.

I would like to use PowerDNS instead I think.  I just need to make  
sure it can work well on this OS.

The specific issues I need to resolve are that I already have tables  
in mysql with column names conforming to named-sdb.  Can I remap these  
to PowerDNS?

I spent most of the evening reading the PowerDNS docs, and I am using  
a similar method, where there is a SOA record, bound to sub records  
with an id key.  This seems close to what PowerDNS does.

The reason I need to map this, and can not change the table structure  
is that a good deal of work has been done already to create a web  
interface for DNS management.  I have written functions for inserting  
new DNS records.  These functions will insert an SOA, and whatever sub  
records they define, from A, AAA, TXT, CNAME etc.

I can easily modify my functions to produce the same input and output  
to the database, as long as PowerDNS can be tricked into using a  
different table structure.  I should note, there is more to this than  
just DNS management, which is in large part why I need to maintain the  
current structure.  There are user_id and group_id as well as  
vendor_id's for each record.  The web interface provides a way for  
users to maintain their own DNS in a simple way, so this is more than   
just an admins tool.

Can someone also explain to me the aspects of the secondary.  With the  
named-sdb system I was going to set up a MySql replication server, and  
install named-sdb on that machine.  I am skipping that for the time  
being, since I currently can not resolve the crashes, and believe they  
would just follow me to the secondary.

One thing I did not see in the docs was a place where the dns email  
address is stored in the database, the user.example.com format of an  
email address.  Did I miss that, as I am pretty sure it must be within  
the SOA record.

I should close in saying that my area of expertise in not with Linux,  
but with OS X. I get around pretty well on the BSD's, but struggle a  
little on the Linux's with the various package managers.  On OS X I  
work to either build from source, or use the MacPorts port manager.

I see PowerDNS is not moving forward on OS X.  I have numerous  
machines with OS X from 10.4 to 10.5 on PPC and Intel.  If this works  
out for me, I would like to start with seeing what happens by making a  
port file for PowerDNS.  Maybe it will just work, that would be a very  
simple way to get up and running on OS X.

If not, I can try to build it out by hand, and if that does not work,  
I am more than willing to give access to a few admin accounts on any  
number of machines I have in my colo.

Thanks for any help you can provide.
-- 
Scott * If you contact me off list replace talklists@ with scott@ *