Download PowerDNS Authoritative Server 4.0.0

PowerDNS is a dns server with a database as back-end, which makes it easy to manage a large number of dns entries. The developers previously decided to release the two parts that make up PowerDNS, a recursor and an authoritative name server, so that a new version can be released more quickly and in a more targeted way, the developers say. The authoritative name server will only respond to a dns lookup if it pertains to the domains for which this server is responsible. The developers have released PowerDNS Authoritative Server 4.0.0. The announcement of this release looks like this:

hello everybody,

We are proud and happy to announce the release of the PowerDNS Authoritative Server version 4.0.0. This release has a great number of new features and improvements compared to PowerDNS Authoritative Server 3.4. More about the 4.0.0 releases can be found on our blog.

Many of the changes are on the inside and were part of the great “spring cleaning“:

• Moved to C++ 2011, a cleaner more powerful version of C++ that has allowed us to improve the quality of implementation in many places.
• Implemented dedicated infrastructure for dealing with DNS names that is fully “DNS Native” and needs less escaping and unescaping. Due to this, the PowerDNS Authoritative Server can now serve DNSSEC-enabled root zones.
• All backends derived from the Generic SQL backend use prepared statements.
• Both the server and pdns_control do the right thing when chroot’ed.
• Caches are now fully canonically ordered, which means entries can be wiped on suffix in all places

In addition to this cleanup, the following new and exciting features have been added:

• A revived and supported ODBC backend (godbc).
• A revived and supported LDAP backend (ldap).
• Support for CDS/CDNSKEY and RFC 7344 key rollovers.
• Support for the ALIAS record.
• The web server and API are no longer experimental. The API path has moved to /api/v1
• DNSUpdate is no longer experimental.
• ECDSA (algorithm 13 and 14) supported without in-tree cryptographic libraries (provided by OpenSSL).
• Experimental support for ed25519 DNSSEC signatures (when compiled with libsodium support).
• Many new pdnsutil commands, eg
  • help command now produces the help
  • Warns if the configuration file cannot be read
  • Does not check disabled records with check-zone unless verbose mode is enabled
  • create-zone command creates a new zone
  • add-record command to add records
  • delete-rrset and replace-rrset commands to delete and add rrsets
  • edit-zone command that spawns $EDITOR with the zone contents in zonefile format regardless of the backend used (blogpost)
• GeoIP backend has gained many features, and can now eg run based on explicit netmasks not present in the GeoIP databases

With new features come removals. The following backends have been dropped in 4.0.0:

• LMDB.
• Geo (use the improved GeoIP instead).

Other important changes and deprecations include:

• pdnssec has been renamed to pdnsutil.
• Support for the PolarSSL/MbedTLS, Crypto++ and Botan cryptographic libraries have been dropped in favor of the (faster) OpenSSL libcrypto (except for GOST, which is still provided by Botan).
• ECDSA P256 SHA256 (algorithm 13) is now the default algorithm when securing zones.
• The PowerDNS Authoritative Server now listens by default on all IPv6 addresses.
• Several superfluous queries have been dropped from the Generic SQL backends, if you use a non-standard SQL schema, please review the new defaults
  • insert-ent-query, insert-empty-non-terminal-query, insert-ent-order-query have been replaced by one query named insert-empty-non-terminal-order-query
  • insert-record-order-query has been dropped, insert-record-query now sets the ordername (or NULL)
  • insert-slave-query has been dropped, insert-zone-query now sets the type of zone
• The INCEPTION, INCEPTION-WEEK and EPOCH SOA-EDIT metadata values ​​are marked as deprecated and will be removed in 4.1.0

We would like to thank everybody who contributed ideas, code, testing and comments during our journey toward 4.0.0.