1.2. Release notes

Before proceding, you should check the release notes for your PDNS version, as specified in the name of the distribution file.

1.2.1. 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:

  • bindbackend can be instructed not to check the ctime of a zone by specifying bind-check-interval=0, which is also the new default.

  • pdns_server --list-modules lists all available modules.

Performance enhancements:

  • TCP code now only creates a new database connection for AXFR.

  • TCP connections timeout rather quickly now, leading to less load on the server.

1.2.2. 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:

  • Zone2sql and the bindbackend now understand the Bind $GENERATE{} syntax.

  • Zone2sql can optionally gloss over non-existing zones with --on-error-resume-next.

  • Zone2sql and the bindbackend now properly expand @ also on the righthand side of records.

  • Zone2sql now sets a default TTL.

  • DNS UPDATEs and NOTIFYs are now logged properly and sent the right responses.

Performance enhancements:

  • 'Fancy records' are no longer queried for on ANY queries - this is a big speedup.

1.2.3. 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 succesfully parsed very large named.confs with large numbers of small domains, as well as small numbers of large domains (TLD).

Zonetransfers are now also much improved.

Major bugs fixed:

Feature enhancements:

  • AXFR can now be disabled, and reenabled per IP address

  • --help accepts a parameter, will then show only help items with that prefix.

  • zone2sql now accepts a --zone-name parameter

  • BindBackend maturing - 9500 zones parsed in 3.5 seconds. No longer case sensitive.

Performance enhancements:

  • Implemented RFC-breaking AXFR format (which is the industry standard). Zonetransfers now zoom along at wirespeed (many megabits/s).

1.2.4. 1.99.2 Early Access Prerelease

Major bugs fixed:

Performance improvements:

  • removed a lot of unnecessary gettimeofday calls

  • removed needless select(2) call in case of listening on only one address

  • removed 3 useless syscalls in the fast path

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:

  • Fixed error checking in init.d script (show, mrtg)

  • Added 'uptime' to the mrtg output

  • removed further GNUisms from installer and init.d scripts for use on FreeBSD

  • Debian package and apt repository, thanks to Wichert Akkerman.

  • FreeBSD /usr/ports, thanks to Peter van Dijk (in progress).

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.

1.2.5. 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.