PowerDNS Authoritative Server 3.0RC1 released! Now with DNSSEC!

I'm very proud to announce the first Release Candidate for PowerDNS Authoritative Server 3.0, now with full support for DNSSEC, TSIG, IPv6 master/slave, per-zone metadata and Lua zone editing. The DNSSEC support is 'fully automatic' - if everything goes well, all that is required is to set 'pdnssec secure-zone powerdns.com' and your zone is secured.

Read on for more information! To download, head to http://powerdnssec.org/downloads 

Warning

Version 3.0 of the PowerDNS Authoritative Server is a major upgrade. Please refer to Section 1, “From PowerDNS Authoritative Server 2.9.x to 3.0” for important information on correct and stable operation, as well as notes on performance and memory use. Known issues as of RC1 include: Not all new features are documented yet Queries for 'empty non-terminals' may give confusing results We are not 100% convinced all corner cases of NSEC3/NXDOMAIN give correct responses. Common cases function well DNSSEC has only been benchmarked up to 2000 queries/second but not beyond A lot more database connections are made and released

	Note
	RC1 released on the 4th of April 2011

Version 3.0 of the PowerDNS Authoritative Server brings a number of important features, as well as over two years of accumulated bug fixing.
The largest news in 3.0 is of course the advent of DNSSEC. Not only does PowerDNS now (finally) support DNSSEC, we think that our support of this important protocol is among the easiest to use available. In addition, all important algorithms are supported.
Complete detail can be found in Chapter 12, Serving authoritative DNSSEC data. The goal of 'PowerDNSSEC' is to allow existing PowerDNS installations to start serving DNSSEC with as little hassle as possible, while maintaining performance and achieving high levels of security.
Tutorials and examples of how to use DNSSEC in PowerDNS can be found linked from http://powerdnssec.org.
This release has received exceptional levels of community support, and we'd like to thank the following people in addition to those mentioned explicitly below: Peter Koch (DENIC), Olaf Kolkman (NLNetLabs), Wouter Wijngaards (NLNetLabs), Marco Davids (SIDN), Markus Travaille (SIDN), Leen Besselink, Antoin Verschuren (SIDN), Olafur Gudmundsson (IETF), Dan Kaminsky (Recursion Ventures), Roy Arends (Nominet), Miek Gieben (SIDN), Stephane Bortzmeyer (AFNIC), Michael Braunoeder (nic.at), Peter van Dijk, Maik Zumstrull, Jose Arthur Benetasso Villanova (Locaweb), Stefan Schmidt, Roland van Rijswijk (Surfnet), Paul Bakker (Brainspark/Fox-IT), Mathew Hennessy, Johannes Kuehrer (Austrian World4You GmbH), Marc van de Geijn (bHosted.nl), Stefan Arentz and Martin van Hensbergen (Fox-IT), Christof Meerwald, Detlef Peeters, Jack Lloyd, Frank Altpeter, frederik danerklint, Vasiliy G Tolstov, Brielle Bruns, Evan Hunt, Ralf van der Enden.
On to the release notes. Next to DNSSEC, other major new features include:

• TSIG for authorizing and authenticating AXFR requests & incoming zone transfers (Code in 2024, 2025, 2033, 2034). This allows for retrieving TSIG protected content, as well as serving it.
• Per zone also-notify.
• MyDNS compatible backend, allowing for 'instantaneous' migration from this authoritative nameserver. Code in commit 1418, contributed by Jonathan Oddy.
• PowerDNS can now slave zones over IPv6 and notify IPv6 remotes of updates. Already. Code in commit 2009 and beyond.
• Lua based incoming zone editing, allowing masters or signing slaves to add information to the zone they will (re-)serve. Implemented in commit 2065. To enable, use LUA-AXFR-SCRIPT zone metadata setting.
• Native Oracle backend with full DNSSEC support. Contributed by Maik Zumstrull, then at the Steinbuch Centre for Computing at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
• "Also-notify" support, implemented by Aki Tuomi in commit 1400. Support for Generic SQL backends and for the BIND backend. Further code in commit 1360.
• Support for binding to thousands of IP addresses, code in commit 1443.
• Generic MySQL backend now supports stored procedures. Implemented in commit 2084, closing ticket 231.
• Generic ODBC backend compiles again, and is reported to work for some users that need it. Code contributed in ticket 309, author unknown.
• Massively parallel slaving infrastructure, able to check the freshness of thousands of remote zones per second, plus perform many incoming zone transfers simultaneously. Sponsored by Tyler Hall, code in 1449, 1500, 1859
• Core DNS logic replaced completely to deal with the brave new world of DNSSEC.

Bugs fixed:

• sqlite2 and sqlite3 backends used MySQL-style escaping, leading to SQL errors in some cases. Discovered by Sten Spans. Fixed in commit 1342.
• Internal webserver no longer prints '1e2%'. Bug rediscovered by Jeff Sipek. Fixed in commit 1342.
• PowerDNS would refuse to serve domain names with spaces in them, or otherwise non-printable characters. Addressed in commit 2081.
• PowerDNS can now serve escaped labels, as described by RF4343. Data should be present in backends in that escaped form. Code in commit 2089.
• In some cases, we would include duplicate CNAMEs. In addition, we would hand out a full root-referral when not configured to in some cases (ticket ticket 223). Discovered by Andreas Jakum, fixed in commit 1344.
• Shane Kerr discovered we would corrupt DNS transaction IDs from the packet cache on big endian systems. Fix in commit 1346, closing ticket 222.
• PowerDNS did not use RF1982 serial arithmetic, leading to a SOA serial number of 1 to be regarded as older than 4400000000, when in fact it is 'newer'. Issue (re-)discovered by Jan-Piet Mens.
• BIND backend got confused of a zone's filename changed after a configuration reload. Fix in commit 1347, closing ticket 228.
• When restarted by the Guardian, PowerDNS will perform a full multi-threaded cache cleanup, which took a long time and could crash. Fix in commit 1364.
• Under artificial circumstances, PowerDNS would never clean its packet cache. Found by Marcus Goller, fix in commit 1399 and commit 1408. This update also retunes the cleanup frequency.
• Packetcache would cache things it should not have been caching. Fixes in commits 1407, 1488, 1869, 1880
• When processing incoming notifications, the BIND backend was case-sensitive, and would disregard notifications in the wrong case. Discovered by 'Dolphin', fix in commit 1420.
• The init.d script did not mention the 'reload' command. Code in commit 1463, closes ticket 233.
• Generic SQL Backends would sometimes emit obscure error messages. Fix in commit 2049.
• PowerDNS would be confused by embedded NULs in domain names, and would also mess up the escaping of some characters. Fix in commit 1468, commit 1469, commit 1478, commit 1480,
• SOA queries for the name of a delegation point were not referred. Fix in commit 1466, closing ticket 224. In addition, queries for AAAA for a CNAMEd record pointing to a name with no AAAA would deliver a direct SOA, without the CNAME in between. Fix in commit 1542, commit 1607. Also, wildcard CNAMEs pointing to a record without the type requested suffered from the same issue, fix in commit 1543.
• On processing an incoming AXFR, once an MX or SRV record had been seen, all future fields got a 'priority' entry as well. This had no operational impact, but looked messy. Fixed in commit 1437.
• Aki Tuomi discovered that the BIND zonefile parser would misrepresent 'something IN MX 15 @'. Fix in commit 1621.
• Marco Davids discovered the BIND zonefile parser would trip over really long lines. Fix in commit 1624, commit 1625.
• Thomas Mieslinger discovered that our webserver would only be started after dropping privileges, which could cause problems. Fix in commit 1629.
• Zone2sql did quite often not do exactly what was required, which users fixed by editing the SQL output. Revamped in commit 2032.
• An Ubuntu user discovered in Launchpad bug 600479 that restarting database threads cost a lot of memory. Normally this is rare, except in case of problems. Addressed in commit 1676.
• BIND backend could crash under (very) high load with very large numbers of zones (hundreds of thousands). Fixed in commit 1690.
• Miek Gieben and Marco Davids spotted that PowerDNS would answer the version.bind query in the IN class too. Bug reported via twitter! Fix in commit 1709.
• Marcus Lauer and the OpenDNSSEC project discovered that outgoing notifications did not carry the 'aa' flag. Fixed in commit 1746.
• Debugging PowerDNS, or backgrounding it, could cause crashes. Fixed by Anders Kaseorg in commit 1747.
• Fixed a bug that could cause crashes on launching thousands of backend connections. Never observed to occur, but who knows. Fix in commit 1792.
• Under some circumstances, large answers could be truncated in mid-record. While technically legal, this upset a number of resolver implementations (including the PowerDNS Recursor!). Fixed in commit 1830, re-closes ticket 200.
• Jan Piet Mens and Florian Weimer discovered we had problems dealing with escaped labels and escaped TXT fields. Fixed in commit 2000.
• After 2.2 billion queries, statistics would wrap oddly. Fix in commit 2019, closing ticket 327.

Improvements:

• Long TXT records are now split into 255-byte components automatically. Implemented in commit 1340, reported by Darren Gamble in ticket 188.
• When receiving large numbers of notifications, PowerDNS would check these synchronously, leading to a slowdown for other services. Fixed in commit 2058, problem diagnosed by Richard Poole of Heart Internet.
• Fixed compilation on newer compilers and newer versions of Boost. Changes in 1345 (closes ticket 227), 1391, 1394, 1425, 1427, 1428, 1429, 1440, 1653, thanks to Ruben Kerkhof and others.
• Moved Generic PostgreSQL backend over to the newer E'' style escapes. commit 2094.
• Compilation fixes for Mac OS X 10.5.7 in commit 1389, thanks to Tobias Markmann.
• We can now bind to scoped IPv6 addresses, lack spotted by Darren Gamble. Part of the fix is in commit 2018.
• Built-in query cache can now also cache queries which lead to multiple answers. Code in commit 2069.
• Prodded on by Jan Piet Mens, we now support 'unknown types' (which look like TYPE65534).
• Add 'slave-renotify' to retransmit notifies for slaved zones, which is helpful when acting as a 'signing slave' for a hidden master. Code in commit 1950.
• No longer let zone2sql and zone2ldap import BIND 'hint' zones. commit 1998.
• Allow for timestamps to explicitly be specified in (s)econds. Code in commit 1398, closing ticket 250.
• Zones with URL and MBOXFW records can be transferred over AXFR, code in commit 1464.
• Maik Zumstrull cleaned up the BIND Backend makefile, plus taught our init.d script to read /etc/default/pdns. Code in commit 1601, commit 1602.
• Generic SQL backends now support multiple masters in the domains table. Code in commit 1857. Additionally, masters can also have :port numbers. Code in commit 1858.