1.3. Release notes

Before proceeding, it is advised to check the release notes for your PDNS version, as specified in the name of the distribution file.

Beyond PowerDNS 2.9.20, the Authoritative Server and Recursor are released separately.

1.3.1. PowerDNS Authoritative Server version 2.9.21

Released the 21st of April 2007.

This is the first release the PowerDNS Authoritative Server since the Recursor was split off to a separate product, and also marks the transfer of the new technology developed specifically for the recursor, back to the authoritative server.

This move has reduced the amount of code of the Authoritative server by over 2000 lines, while improving the quality of the program enormously.

However, since so much has been changed, care should be taken when deploying 2.9.21.

To signify the magnitude of the underlying improvements, the next release of the PowerDNS Authoritative Server will be called 3.0.

This release would not have been possible without large amounts of help and support from the PowerDNS Community. We specifically want to thank Massimo Bandinelli of Italy's Register.it, Dave Aaldering of Aaldering ICT, True BV, XS4ALL, Daniel Bilik of Neosystem, EasyDNS, Heinrich Ruthensteiner of Siemens, Augie Schwer, Mark Bergsma, Marco Davids, Marcus Rueckert of OpenSUSE, Andre Muraro of Locaweb, Antony Lesuisse, Norbert Sendetzky, Marco Chiavacci, Christoph Haas, Ralf van der Enden and Ruben Kerkhof.

Security issues:

Warning

The 'bind1' legacy version of our BIND backend has been dropped! There should be no need to rely on this old version anymore, as the main BIND backend has been very well tested recently.

Bugs:

Features:

Improvements:

1.3.2. Recursor version 3.1.4

Released the 13th of November 2006.

This release contains almost no new features, but consists mostly of minor and major bug fixes. It also addresses two major security issues, which makes this release a highly recommended upgrade.

Security issues:

Bugs:

Improvements:

1.3.3. Recursor version 3.1.3

Released the 12th of September 2006.

Compared to 3.1.2, this release again consists of a number of mostly minor bug fixes, and some slight improvements.

Many thanks are again due to Darren Gamble who together with his team has discovered many misconfigured domains that do work with some other name servers. DNS has long been tolerant of misconfigurations, PowerDNS intends to uphold that tradition. Almost all of the domains found by Darren now work as well in PowerDNS as in other name server implementations.

Thanks to some recent migrations, this release, or something very close to it, is powering over 40 million internet connections that we know of. We appreciate hearing about succesful as well as unsuccesful migrations, please feel free to notify pdns.bd@powerdns.com of your experiences, good or bad.

Bug-fixes:

Improvements:

1.3.4. Recursor version 3.1.2

Released Monday 26th of June 2006.

Compared to 3.1.1, this release consists almost exclusively of bug-fixes and speedups. A quick update is recommended, as some of the bugs impact operators of authoritative zones on the internet. This version has been tested by some of the largest internet providers on the planet, and is expected to perform well for everybody.

Many thanks are due to Darren Gamble, Stefan Schmidt and Bryan Seitz who all provided excellent feedback based on their large-scale tests of the recursor.

Bug-fixes:

Improvements:

1.3.5. Recursor version 3.1.1

Warning

3.1.1 is identical to 3.1 except for a bug in the packet chaining code which would mainly manifest itself for IPv6 enabled Konqueror users with very fast connections to their PowerDNS installation. However, all 3.1 users are urged to upgrade to 3.1.1. Many thanks to Alessandro Bono for his quick aid in solving this problem.

Released on the 23rd of May 2006. Many thanks are due to the operators of some of the largest internet access providers in the world, each having many millions of customers, who have tested the various 3.1 pre-releases for suitability. They have uncovered and helped fix bugs that could impact us all, but are only (quickly) noticeable with such vast amounts of DNS traffic.

After version 3.0.1 has proved to hold up very well under tremendous loads, 3.1 adds important new features:

Bug fixes:

Improvements:

1.3.6. Recursor version 3.0.1

Released 25th of April 2006, download.

This release consists of nothing but tiny fixes to 3.0, including one with security implications. An upgrade is highly recommended.

Operating system specific fixes:

1.3.7. Recursor version 3.0

Released 20th of April 2006, download.

This is the first separate release of the PowerDNS Recursor. There are many reasons for this, one of the most important ones is that previously we could only do a release when both the recursor and the authoritative nameserver were fully tested and in good shape. The split allows us to release new versions when each part is ready.

Now for the real news. This version of the PowerDNS recursor powers the network access of over two million internet connections. Two large access providers have been running pre-releases of 3.0 for the past few weeks and results are good. Furthermore, the various pre-releases have been tested nearly non-stop with DNS traffic replayed at 3000 queries/second.

As expected, the 2 million househoulds shook out some very rare bugs. But even a rare bug happens once in a while when there are this many users.

We consider this version of the PowerDNS recursor to be the most advanced resolver publicly available. Given current levels of spam, phishing and other forms of internet crime we think no recursor should offer less than the best in spoofing protection. We urge all operators of resolvers without proper spoofing countermeasures to consider PowerDNS, as it is a Better Internet Nameserver Daemon.

A good article on DNS spoofing can be found here. Some more information, based on a previous version of PowerDNS, can be found on the PowerDNS development blog.

Warning

Because of recent DNS based denial of service attacks, running an open recursor has become a security risk. Therefore, unless configured otherwise this version of PowerDNS will only listen on localhost, which means it does not resolve for hosts on your network. To fix, configure the local-address setting with all addresses you want to listen on. Additionally, by default service is restricted to RFC 1918 private IP addresses. Use allow-from to selectively open up the recursor for your own network. See Section 12.1 for details.

Important new features of the PowerDNS recursor 3.0:

Many people helped package and test this release. Jorn Ekkelenkamp of ISP-Services helped find the '8000 SOAs' bug and spotted many other oddities and XS4ALL internet funded a lot of the recent development. Joaquín M López Muñoz of the boost::multi_index_container was again of great help.

1.3.8. Version 2.9.20

Released the 15th of March 2006

Besides adding OpenDBX, this release is mostly about fixing problems and speeding up the recursor. This release has been made possible by XS4ALL and True. Thanks!

Furthermore, we are very grateful for the help of Andrew Pinski, who hacks on gcc, and of Joaquín M López Muñoz, the author of boost::multi_index_container. Without their near-realtime help this release would've been delayed a lot. Thanks!

Bugs fixed in the recursor:

Improvements to the recursor:

Bugs fixed in the authoritative nameserver:

Improvements to the authoritative nameserver:

Miscellaneous:

1.3.9. Version 2.9.19

Released 29th of October 2005.

As with other recent releases, the usage of PowerDNS appears to have skyrocketed. Informal, though strict, measurements show that PowerDNS now powers around 50% of all German domains, and somewhere in the order of 10-15% of the rest of the world. Furthermore, DNS is set to take a central role in connecting Voice over IP providers, with PowerDNS offering a very good feature set for these ENUM deployments. PowerDNS is already powering the E164.info ENUM zone and also acts as the backend for a major VoIP provisioning platform.

Included in this release is the now complete packet parsing/generating, record parsing/generating infrastructure. Furthermore, this framework is used by the recursor, hopefully making it very fast, memory efficient and robust. Many records are now processed using a single line of code. This has made the recursor a lot stricter in packet parsing, you will see some error messages which did not appear before. Rest assured however that these only happen for queries which have no valid answer in any case.

Furthermore, support for DNSSEC records is available in the new infrastructure, although is should be emphasised that there is more to DNSSEC than parsing records. There is no real support for DNSSEC (yet).

Additionally, the BIND Backend has been replaced by what was up to now known as the 'Bind2Backend'. Initial benchmarking appears to show that this backend is faster, uses less memory and has shorter startup times. The code is also shorter.

This release fixes a number of embarassing bugs and is a recommended upgrade.

Thanks are due to XS4ALL who are supporting continuing development of PowerDNS, the fruits of which can be found in this release already. Furthermore, a remarkable number of people have helped report bugs, validate solutions or have submitted entire patches. Many thanks!

Improvements:

Bugs fixed:

1.3.10. Version 2.9.18

Released on the 16th of July 2005.

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 (vastly improved recursor, Generic Oracle Support, DNS analysis and replay tools, and more) but also has a new build dependency, the Boost library (version 1.31 or higher).

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.

Additionally, the bind2backend is almost ready to replace the stock bind backend. If you run with Bind zones, you are cordially invited to substitute 'launch=bind2' for 'launch=bind'. This will happen automatically in 2.9.19!

In other news, the entire Wikipedia constellation now runs on PowerDNS using the Geo Backend! Thanks to Mark Bergsma for keeping us updated.

There are two bugs with security implications, which only apply to installations running with the LDAP backend, or installations providing recursion to a limited range of IP addresses. If any of these apply to you, an upgrade is highly advised:

General bugs fixed:

Compilation fixes:

Improvements:

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.

Backend fixes:

New technology:

1.3.11. Version 2.9.17

See the new timeline for progress reports.

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:

Enhancements:

Bug fixes:

1.3.12. Version 2.9.16

The 'it must still be Friday somewhere' release. Massive number of fixes, portability improvements and the new Geobackend by Mark Bergsma & friends.

New:

Bugfixes:

Improvements:

1.3.13. Version 2.9.15

This release fixes up some of the shortcomings in 2.9.14, and adds some new features too.

Bugfixes:

Improvements:

1.3.14. Version 2.9.14

Big release with the fix for the all important 2^30 seconds problem and a lot of other news.

Improvements:

1.3.15. Version 2.9.13

Big news! Windows is back! Our great friend Michel Stol found the time to update the PowerDNS code so it works again under windows.

Furthermore, big thanks go out to Dell who quickly repaired my trusty laptop.

His changes:

Other news:

Note

There appears to be a problem with PowerDNS on Red Hat 7.3 with GCC 2.96 and self-compiled binaries. The symptoms are that PowerDNS works on the foreground but fails as a daemon. We're working on it.

If you do note problems, let the list know, if you don't, please do so as well. Tell us if you use the RPM or compiled yourself.

It is known that not compiling in MySQL support helps solve the problem, but then you don't have MySQL.

There have been a number of reports on MySQL connections being dropped on FreeBSD 4.x, which sometimes causes PowerDNS to give up and reload itself. To combat this, MySQL error messages have been improved in some places in hopes of figuring out what is up. The initial indication is that MySQL itself sometimes terminates the connection and, amazingly, that switching to a Unix domain socket instead of TCP solves the problem.

Bug fixes:

Improvements:

1.3.16. Version 2.9.12

Release rich in features. Work on Verisign oddities, addition of SQLite backend, pdns_recursor maturity.

New features:

Bugs:

Improvements, cleanups:

1.3.17. Version 2.9.11

Yet another iteration, hopefully this will be the last silly release.

Warning

There has been a change in behaviour whereby disable-axfr does what it means now! From now on, setting allow-axfr-ips automatically disables AXFR from unmentioned subnets.

This release enables AXFR again, disable-axfr did the opposite of what it claimed. Furthermore, the pdns_recursor now cleans its cache, which should save some memory in the long run. Norbert contributed some small LDAP work which should come in useful in the future.

1.3.18. Version 2.9.10

Small bugfixes, LDAP update. Released 3rd of July 2003. Apologies for the long delay, real life keeps interfering.

Warning

Do not use or try to use 2.9.9, it was a botched release!

Warning

There has been a change in behaviour whereby disable-axfr does what it means now! From now on, setting allow-axfr-ips automatically disables AXFR from unmentioned subnets.

1.3.19. Version 2.9.8

Queen's day release! 30th of April 2003.

Added support for AIX, fixed negative SOA caching. Some other cleanups. Not a major release but enough reasons to upgrade.

Bugs fixed:

Improvements:

1.3.20. Version 2.9.7

Released on 2003-03-20.

This is a sweeping release in the sense of cleanup. There are some new features but mostly a lot of cleanup going on. Hiding inside is the bind2backend, the next generation of the bind backend. A work in progress. Those of you with overlapping zones, as mentioned in the changelog of 2.9.6, are invited to check it out by replacing launch=bind by launch=bind2 and renaming all bind- parameters to bind2-. Be aware that if you run with many small zones, this backend is faster, but if you run with a few large ones, it is slower. This will improve.

Features:

Improvements:

Bugs fixed:

1.3.21. Version 2.9.6

Two new backends - Generic ODBC (windows only) and LDAP. Furthermore, a few important bugs have been fixed which may have hampered sites seeing a lot of outgoing zonetransfers. Additionally, the pdns recursor now has 'query throttling' which is pretty cool. In short this makes sure that PowerDNS does not send out heaps of queries if a nameserver is unable to provide an answer. Many operators of authoritative setups are all too aware of recursing nameservers that hammer them for zones they don't have, PowerDNS won't do that anymore now, no matter what clients request of it.

Warning

There is an unresolved issue with the BIND backend and 'overlapping' slave zones. So if you have 'example.com' and also have a separate slave zone called 'external.example.com', things may go wrong badly. Thanks to Christian Laursen for working with us a lot in finding this issue. We hope to resolve it soon.

1.3.22. Version 2.9.5

Released on 2002-02-03.

This version is almost entirely about recursion with major changes to both the pdns recursor, which is renamed to 'pdns_recursor' and to the main PowerDNS binary to make it interact better with the recursing component.

Sadly, due to technical reasons, compiling the pdns recursor and pdns authoritative nameserver into one binary is not immediately possible. During the release of 2.9.4 we stated that the recursing nameserver would be integrated in the next release - this won't happen now.

However, this turns out to not be that bad at all. The recursor can now be restarted without having to restart the rest of the nameserver, for example. Cooperation between the both halves of PDNS is also almost seamless. As a result, 'non-lazy recursion' has been dropped. See Chapter 11 for more details.

Furthermore, the recursor only works on Linux, Windows and Solaris (not entirely). FreeBSD does not support the required functions. If you know any important FreeBSD people, plea with them to support set/get/swapcontext! Alternatively, FreeBSD coders could read the solution presented here in figure 5.

The 'Contributor of the Month' award goes to Mark Bergsma who has responded to our plea for help with the label compressor and contributed a wonderfully simple and right fix that allows PDNS to compress just as well as Other namerervers out there. An honorary mention goes to Ueli Heuer who, despite having no C++ experience, submitted an excellent SRV record implementation.

Excellent work was also performed by Michel Stol, the Windows guy, in fixing all our non-portable stuff again. Christof Meerwald has also done wonderful work in porting MTasker to Windows, which was then used by Michel to get the recursor functioning on Windows.

Other changes:

1.3.23. Version 2.9.4

Yet another grand release. Big news is the addition of a recursing nameserver which has sprung into existence over the past week. It is in use on several computers already but it is not ready for prime time. Complete integration with PowerDNS is expected around 2.9.5, for now the recursor is a separate program.

In preliminary tests, the recursor appears to be four times faster than BIND 9 on a naive benchmark starting from a cold cache. BIND 9 managed to get through to some slower nameservers however, which were given up on by PowerDNS. We will continue to tune the recursor. See Chapter 12 for further details.

The BIND Backend has also been tested (see the bind-domain-status item below) rather heavily by several parties. After some discussion online, one of the BIND authors ventured that the newsgroup comp.protocols.dns.bind may now in fact be an appropriate venue for discussing PowerDNS. Since this discussion, traffic to the PowerDNS pages has increased sixfold and shows no signs of slowing down.

From this, it is apparent that far more people are interested in PowerDNS than yet know about it. So spread the word!

In other news, we now have a security page at Section 1.4. Furthermore, Maurice Nonnekes contributed an OpenBSD port! See his page for more details!

New features and improvements:

A tremendous number of bugs were discovered and fixed:

1.3.24. Version 2.9.3a

Note

2.9.3a is identical to 2.9.3 except that zone2sql does work

Broad range of huge improvements. We now have an all-static .rpm and .deb for Linux users and a link to an OpenBSD port. Major news is that work on the Bind backend has progressed to the point that we've just retired our last Bind server and replaced it with PowerDNS in Bind mode! This server is operating a number of master and slave setups so it should stress the Bind backend somewhat.

This version is rapidly approaching the point where it is a better-Bind-than-Bind and nearly a drop-in replacement for authoritative setups. PowerDNS is now equipped with a powerful master/slave apparatus that offers a lot of insight and control to the user, even when operating from Bind zonefiles and a Bind configuration. Observe.

After the SOA of ds9a.nl was raised:

pdns[17495]: All slave domains are fresh
pdns[17495]: 1 domain for which we are master needs notifications
pdns[17495]: Queued notification of domain 'ds9a.nl' to 195.193.163.3
pdns[17495]: Queued notification of domain 'ds9a.nl' to 213.156.2.1
pdns[17520]: AXFR of domain 'ds9a.nl' initiated by 195.193.163.3
pdns[17520]: AXFR of domain 'ds9a.nl' to 195.193.163.3 finished
pdns[17521]: AXFR of domain 'ds9a.nl' initiated by 213.156.2.1
pdns[17521]: AXFR of domain 'ds9a.nl' to 213.156.2.1 finished
pdns[17495]: Removed from notification list: 'ds9a.nl' to 195.193.163.3 (was acknowledged)
pdns[17495]: Removed from notification list: 'ds9a.nl' to 213.156.2.1 (was acknowledged)
pdns[17495]: No master domains need notifications
	  
If however our slaves would ignore us, as some are prone to do, we can send some additional notifications:
$ sudo pdns_control notify ds9a.nl         
Added to queue
pdns[17492]: Notification request for domain 'ds9a.nl' received
pdns[17492]: Queued notification of domain 'ds9a.nl' to 195.193.163.3
pdns[17492]: Queued notification of domain 'ds9a.nl' to 213.156.2.1
pdns[17495]: Removed from notification list: 'ds9a.nl' to 195.193.163.3 (was acknowledged)
pdns[17495]: Removed from notification list: 'ds9a.nl' to 213.156.2.1 (was acknowledged)
	    
Conversely, if PowerDNS needs to be reminded to retrieve a zone from a master, a command is provided:
$ sudo pdns_control retrieve forfun.net
Added retrieval request for 'forfun.net' from master 212.187.98.67
pdns[17495]: AXFR started for 'forfun.net', transaction started
pdns[17495]: Zone 'forfun.net' (/var/cache/bind/forfun.net) reloaded 
pdns[17495]: AXFR done for 'forfun.net', zone committed
	  
Also, you can force PowerDNS to reload a zone from disk immediately with pdns_control bind-reload-now. All this happens 'live', per your instructions. Without instructions, the right things also happen, but the operator is in charge.

For more about all this coolness, see Section B.1.1 and Section A.9.2.

Warning

Again some changes in compilation instructions. The hybrid pgmysql backend has been split up into 'gmysql' and 'gpgsql', sharing a common base within the PowerDNS server itself. This means that you can no longer compile --with-modules="pgmysql" --enable-mysql --enable-pgsql but that you should now use: --with-modules="gmysql gpgsql". The old launch-names remain available.

If you launch the Generic PgSQL backend as gpgsql2, all parameters will have gpsql2 as a prefix, for example pgsql2-dbname. If launched as gpsql, the regular names are in effect.

Warning

The pdns_control protocol was changed which means that older pdns_controls cannot talk to 2.9.3. The other way around is broken too. This may lead to problems with automatic upgrade scripts, so pay attention if your daemon is truly restarted.

Also make sure no old pdns_control command is around to confuse things.

Improvements:

Changes:

Bugfixes:

1.3.25. Version 2.9.2

Bugfixes galore. Solaris porting created some issues on all platforms. Great news is that PowerDNS is now in Debian 'sid' (unstable). The 2.9.1 packages in there currently aren't very good but the 2.9.2 ones will be. Many thanks to Wichert Akkerman, our 'downstream' for making this possible.

Warning

The Generic MySQL backend, part of the Generic MySQL & PostgreSQL backend, is now the DEFAULT! The previous default, the 'mysql' backend (note the lack of 'g') is now DEPRECATED. This was the source of much confusion. The 'mysql' backend does not support MASTER or SLAVE operation. The Generic backends do.

To get back the mysql backend, add --with-modules="mysql" or --with-dynmodules="mysql" if you prefer to load your modules at runtime.

Bugs fixed:

Documentation:

Features:

1.3.26. Version 2.9.1

Thanks to the great enthusiasm from around the world, powerdns is now available for Solaris and FreeBSD users again! Furthermore, the Windows build is back. We are very grateful for the help of:

We are happy to have been able to work with the open source community to improve PowerDNS!

Changes:

1.3.27. Version 2.9

Open source release. Do not deploy unless you know what you are doing. Stability is expected to return with 2.9.1, as are the binary builds.

1.3.28. Version 2.8

From this release onwards, we'll concentrate on stabilising for the 3.0 release. So if you have any must-have features, let us know soonest. The 2.8 release fixes a bunch of small stability issues and add two new features. In the spirit of the move to stability, this release has already been running 24 hours on our servers before release.

1.3.29. Version 2.7 and 2.7.1

This version fixes some very long standing issues and adds a few new features. If you are still running 2.6, upgrade yesterday. If you were running 2.6.1, an upgrade is still strongly advised.

Features:

Bugs:

1.3.30. Version 2.6.1

Quick fix release for a big cache problem.

1.3.31. Version 2.6

Performance release. A lot of work has been done to raise PDNS performance to staggering levels in order to take part in benchmarketing efforts. Together with our as yet unnamed partner, PDNS has been benchmarked at 60.000 mostly cached queries/second on off the shelf PC hardware. Uncached performance was 17.000 uncached DNS queries/second on the .ORG domain.

Performance has been increased by both making PDNS itself quicker but also by lowering the number of backend queries typically needed. Operators will typically see PDNS taking less CPU and the backend seeing less load.

Furthermore, some real bugs were fixed. A couple of undocumented performance switches may appear in --help output but you are advised to stay away from these.

Developers: this version needs the pdns-2.5.1 development kit, available on http://downloads.powerdns.com/releases/dev. See also Appendix C.

Performance:

Bugs fixed:

Features:

1.3.32. Version 2.5.1

Brown paper bag release fixing a huge memory leak in the new Query Cache.

Developers: this version needs the new pdns-2.5.1 development kit, available on http://downloads.powerdns.com/releases/dev. See also Appendix C.

And some small changes:

1.3.33. Version 2.5

An important release which has seen quite a lot of trial and error testing. As a result, PDNS can now run with a huge cache and concurrent invalidations. This is useful when running of a slower database or under high traffic load with a fast database.

Furthermore, the gpgsql2 backend has been validated for use and will soon supplant the gpgsql backend entirely. This also bodes well for the gmysql backend which is the same code.

Also, a large amount of issues biting large scale slave operators were addressed. Most of these issues would only show up after prolonged uptime.

New features:

Enhancements:

Bugs fixed:

1.3.34. Version 2.4

Developers: this version is compatible with the pdns-2.1 development kit, available on http://downloads.powerdns.com/releases/dev. See also Appendix C.

This version fixes some stability issues with malformed or malcrafted packets. An upgrade is advised. Furthermore, there are interesting new features.

New features:

Bugs fixed:

Documentation: added details for strict-rfc-axfrs. This feature can be used if very old clients need to be able to do zone transfers with PDNS. Very slow.

1.3.35. Version 2.3

Developers: this version is compatible with the pdns-2.1 development kit, available on http://downloads.powerdns.com/releases/dev. See also Appendix C.

This release adds the Generic MySQL backend which allows full master/slave semantics with MySQL and InnoDB tables (or other tables that support transactions). See Section A.5.

Other new features:

Bugs fixed:

1.3.36. Version 2.2

Developers: this version is compatible with the pdns-2.1 development kit, available on http://downloads.powerdns.com/releases/dev. See also Appendix C.

Again a big release. PowerDNS is seeing some larger deployments in more demanding environments and these are helping shake out remaining issues, especially with recursing backends.

The big news is that wildcard CNAMEs are now supported, an oft requested feature and nearly the only part in which PDNS differed from BIND in authoritative capabilities.

If you were seeing signal 6 errors in PDNS causing reloads and intermittent service disruptions, please upgrade to this version.

For operators of PowerDNS Express trying to host .DE domains, the very special soa-serial-offset feature has been added to placate the new DENIC requirement that the SOA serial be at least six digits. PowerDNS Express uses the SOA serial as an actual serial and not to insert dates and hence often has single digit soa serial numbers, causing big problems with .DE redelegations.

Bugs fixed:

New features:

1.3.37. Version 2.1

This is a somewhat bigger release due to pressing demands from customers. An upgrade is advised for installations using Recursion. If you are using recursion, it is vital that you are aware of changes in semantics. Basically, local data will now override data in your recursing backend under most circumstances. Old behaviour can be restored by turning lazy-recursion off.

Developers: this version has a new pdns-2.1 development kit, available on http://downloads.powerdns.com/releases/dev. See also Appendix C.

Warning

Most users will run a static version of PDNS which has no dependencies on external libraries. However, some may need to run the dynamic version. This warning applies to these users.

To run the dynamic version of PDNS, which is needed for backend drivers which are only available in source form, gcc 3.0 is required. RedHat 7.2 comes with gcc 3.0 as an optional component, RedHat 7.3 does not. However, the RedHat 7.2 Update gcc rpms install just fine on RedHat 7.3. For Debian, we suggest running 'woody' and installing the g++-3.0 package. We expect to release a FreeBSD dynamic version shortly.

Bugs fixed:

Unexpected behaviour:

Features:

1.3.38. Version 2.0.1

Maintenance release, fixing three small issues.

Developers: this version is compatible with 1.99.11 backends.

1.3.39. Version 2.0

Two bugfixes, one stability/security related. No new features.

Developers: this version is compatible with 1.99.11 backends.

Bugfixes:

1.3.40. Version 2.0 Release Candidate 2

Mostly bugfixes, no really new features.

Developers: this version is compatible with 1.99.11 backends.

Bugs fixed:

Features:

Remaining issues:

1.3.41. Version 2.0 Release Candidate 1

The MacOS X release! A very experimental OS X 10.2 build has been added. Furthermore, the Windows version is now in line with Unix with respect to capabilities. The ODBC backend now has the code to function as both a master and a slave.

Developers: this version is compatible with 1.99.11 backends.

Bugs fixed:

Windows changes. We are indebted to Dimitry Andric who educated us in the ways of distributing Windows software.

1.3.42. Version 1.99.12 Prerelease

The Windows release! See Chapter 3. Beware, windows support is still very fresh and untested. Feedback is very welcome.

Developers: this version is compatible with 1.99.11 backends.

Bugs fixed:

Features:

1.3.43. Version 1.99.11 Prerelease

This release is important because it is the first release which is accompanied by an Open Source Backend Development Kit, allowing external developers to write backends for PDNS. Furthermore, a few bugs have been fixed:

1.3.44. Version 1.99.10 Prerelease

IMPORTANT: there has been a tiny license change involving free public webbased dns hosting, check out the changes before deploying!

PDNS is now feature complete, or very nearly so. Besides adding features, a lot of 'fleshing out' work is done now. There is an important performance bug fix which may have lead to disappointing benchmarks - so if you saw any of that, please try either this version or 1.99.8 which also does not have the bug.

This version has been very stable for us on multiple hosts, as was 1.99.9.

PostgreSQL users should be aware that while 1.99.10 works with the schema as presented in earlier versions, advanced features such as master or slave support will not work unless you create the new 'domains' table as well.

Bugs fixed:

Features:

1.3.45. Version 1.99.9 Early Access Prerelease

This is again a feature and an infrastructure release. We are nearly feature complete and will soon start work on the backends to make sure that they are all master, slave and 'superslave' capable.

Bugs fixed:

Features:

Internal:

1.3.46. Version 1.99.8 Early Access Prerelease

A lot of infrastructure work gearing up to 2.0. Some stability bugs fixed and a lot of new features.

Bugs fixed:

Feature enhancements:

1.3.46.1. Known bugs

Wildcard CNAMES do not work as they do with bind.

Recursion sometimes sends out duplicate packets (fixed in 1.99.9 snapshots)

Some stability issues which are caught by the guardian

1.3.46.2. Missing features

Features present in this document, but disabled or withheld from the current release:

  • gmysqlbackend, oraclebackend

1.3.47. Version 1.99.7 Early Access Prerelease

Named.conf parsing got a lot of work and many more bind configurations can now be parsed. Furthermore, error reporting was improved. Stability is looking good.

Bugs fixed:

Feature enhancements:

1.3.47.1. Known bugs

Wildcard CNAMES do not work as they do with bind.

1.3.47.2. Missing features

Features present in this document, but disabled or withheld from the current release:

  • gmysqlbackend, oraclebackend

Some of these features will be present in newer releases.

1.3.48. Version 1.99.6 Early Access Prerelease

This version is now running on dns-eu1.powerdns.net and working very well for us. But please remain cautious before deploying!

Bugs fixed:

Feature enhancements:

1.3.48.1. Known bugs

FreeBSD version does not stop when requested to do so.

Wildcard CNAMES do not work as they do with bind.

1.3.48.2. Missing features

Features present in this document, but disabled or withheld from the current release:

  • gmysqlbackend, oraclebackend

Some of these features will be present in newer releases.

1.3.49. Version 1.99.5 Early Access Prerelease

The main focus of this release is stability and TCP improvements. This is the first release PowerDNS-the-company actually considers for running on its production servers!

Major bugs fixed:

Feature enhancements:

Performance enhancements:

1.3.49.1. Known bugs

FreeBSD version does not stop when requested to do so.

Wildcard CNAMES do not work as they do with bind.

1.3.49.2. Missing features

Features present in this document, but disabled or withheld from the current release:

  • gmysqlbackend, oraclebackend, gpgsqlbackend

Some of these features will be present in newer releases.

1.3.50. Version 1.99.4 Early Access Prerelease

A lot of new named.confs can now be parsed, zone2sql & bindbackend have gained features and stability.

Major bugs fixed:

Feature enhancements:

Performance enhancements:

1.3.50.1. Known bugs

FreeBSD version does not stop when requested to do so.

Zone2sql refuses named.confs with less than 100 domains.

Wildcard CNAMES do not work as they do with bind.

1.3.50.2. Missing features

Features present in this document, but disabled or withheld from the current release:

  • gmysqlbackend, oraclebackend, gpgsqlbackend

Some of these features will be present in newer releases.

1.3.51. Version 1.99.3 Early Access Prerelease

The big news in this release is the BindBackend which is now capable of parsing many more named.conf Bind configurations. Furthermore, PDNS has successfully parsed very large named.confs with large numbers of small domains, as well as small numbers of large domains (TLD).

Zone transfers are now also much improved.

Major bugs fixed:

Feature enhancements:

Performance enhancements:

1.3.51.1. Known bugs

FreeBSD version does not stop when requested to do so.

BindBackend cannot parse zones with $GENERATE statements.

1.3.51.2. Missing features

Features present in this document, but disabled or withheld from the current release:

  • gmysqlbackend, oraclebackend, gpgsqlbackend

Some of these features will be present in newer releases.

1.3.52. Version 1.99.2 Early Access Prerelease

Major bugs fixed:

Performance improvements:

Having said that, more work may need to be done. Testing on a 486 saw packet rates in a simple setup (question/wait/answer/question..) improve from 200 queries/second to over 400.

Usability improvements:

Stability may be an issue as well as performance. This version has a tendency to log a bit too much which slows the nameserver down a lot.

1.3.52.1. Known bugs

Decreasing a ringbuffer on the website is a sure way to crash the daemon. Zone2sql, while improved, still has problems with a zone in the following format:

name         IN            A        1.2.3.4
             IN            A        1.2.3.5
	    
To fix, add 'name' to the second line.

Zone2sql does not close filedescriptors.

FreeBSD version does not stop when requested via the init.d script.

1.3.52.2. Missing features

Features present in this document, but disabled or withheld from the current release:

  • gmysqlbackend, oraclebackend, gpgsqlbackend

  • fully functioning bindbackend - will try to parse named.conf, but probably fail

Some of these features will be present in newer releases.

1.3.53. Version 1.99.1 Early Access Prerelease

This is the first public release of what is going to become PDNS 2.0. As such, it is not of production quality. Even PowerDNS-the-company does not run this yet.

Stability may be an issue as well as performance. This version has a tendency to log a bit too much which slows the nameserver down a lot.

1.3.53.1. Known bugs

Decreasing a ringbuffer on the website is a sure way to crash the daemon. Zone2sql is very buggy.

1.3.53.2. Missing features

Features present in this document, but disabled or withheld from the current release:

  • gmysqlbackend, oraclebackend, gpgsqlbackend

  • fully functioning bindbackend - will not parse configuration files

Some of these features will be present in newer releases.