Vacation over; New MaraDNS snapshot

I'm done with my vacation and am staying in Mexico for the time being. So I will be able to answer support emails, but only about once a week.

I just released a new snapshot of MaraDNS today. The main change with this snapshot is that TXT fields can not have the '|' nor '#' characters in them if tilde separation is enabled (This will not be enabled for users using MaraDNS 1.2 zone files).

The thinking is that this will make it easier for scripts to parse csv2 zone files.

- Sam

I'm on vacation until late January

Just to make it clear: I'm on vacation until late January and will be unable to respond to MaraDNS questions nor make MaraDNS updates while I am on vacation.

I will post a new blog entry about being available again as soon as vacation ends.

MaraDNS 2007/01/16 snapshot

I have just released the 2007/01/16 snapshot of MaraDNS today. This release makes some minor updates to the documentation; the primary change is that the contact page has a prominent note that I will be on vacation, unable to answer email, until late January.

I have a report that recurse_delegation in the snapshot branch may not be working. I will be unable to look at this feature until I finish my vacation in late January.

I would like to thank all of my users who have been sending me bug reports and questions, and will continue MaraDNS development and support in late January.

As a final note, the stable version of MaraDNS is 1.2.12.04.

- Sam

Maradns 2007/01/14 snapshot

I have just made a 2007/01/14 snapshot of MaraDNS. This has the following updates from the last snapshot:

• I have added a new mararc variable, recurse_delegation, to allow MaraDNS to recurse requests where MaraDNS would otherwise give a NS delegation record.
  
  
• I have revised the update document to reflect the post-1.2 changes to MaraDNS
  
  
• The special "version.maradns" TXT query now works again if enabled, and if MaraDNS is running as a 100% recursive server.
  

MaraDNS 2007/01/12 snapshot released

I have just released the MaraDNS 2007/01/12 snapshot.

The big change from 1.3.02 in this snapshot is that a bug, where a hostname could not be a '.' by itself, has been fixed.

The small change is that the MaraDNS homepage now has a link to this blog.

Check it out here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/1.3/snap/200701/

- Sam

Useful short shell scripts

Useful short shell scripts:

grep -n Unexpected Csv2_parse.c | awk -F: '{print "b Csv2_parse.c:"$1}'

This finds all examples of "Unexpected" in the file Csv2_parse.c, and converts the grep output into an input for gdb so I can make all of these lines breakpoints.

for a in [1-9]* ; do cat $a | awk -F\> '{a++} /Label\:/ {a=1} a==3{print "'$a' "$4}' | cut -f1 -d\< | sed 's/.html//' | grep [a-zA-Z] ; done > Label.list

This script, run in a directory with all of the SACD entries in sa-cd net in a single directory, gord through all of the HTML files and tells us the label for each and every SACD, in a single file named "Label.list"

Known MaraDNS annoyances

Here is my list of known MaraDNS annoyances.

• MaraDNS 1.0 does not correctly show ANY records in the authoritative cache if the RD bit is set. The bug is in line 2316 of MaraDNS.c; this has been fixed in 1.2. This is not an issue serious enough to fix in the 1.0 branch. The workaround is to use the '-n' option with askmara with debugging issues with authoritative records, or, better yet, to upgrade to MaraDNS 1.2.
  
• MaraDNS 1.2 can't resolve non-authoritative star records. Basically, star records have to be in the zone they say are in; a star record that ends in "example.com" has to be in a zone file for ".", "com.", or "example.com." The workaround is to either help betatest the 1.3 release (which fixes this issue) or to make sure star records are always in their own zone.
  
• There is an issue with hostnames that are just a '.' by itself (the root). This issue has been fixed in the January 12 snapshot of MaraDNS. The workaround is to use a % in a '.' zone for root hostnames.
  

MaraDNS 1.3.02 released; Blogger borked

MaraDNS 1.3.02 has been released. This is a testing release; this test adds a number of features which have not been fully tested and will add new bugs. For example, the special "version.maradns" query does not work if MaraDNS does not serve any zone files.

The release is available here:

http://www.maradns.org/downlod.html

Scroll down to "testing release".

From the changelog:

• The recursive resolver can now use custom root servers for subtrees of the DNS space; for example root_servers["local."] = "10.1.2.3"
• Windows port now compiles with -Os, resulting in a smaller Windows binary (actually, when I built the 1.2.12.04 binary, I set this parameter by hand; now it's the default Windows build flag)
• Windows port now uses pthreads-w32 2.8 instead of pthreads-w32 2.6
• csv2 parsing code updated to always allow and always ignore commented tildes
• Bugfix: Star records that aren't in an authoritative zone now work
• MaraDNS now will not waste time trying to find authoritative records if there are no authoritative records to find
• Some minor webpage updates
• Troubleshooting guide added to tutorial

* * *

It would seem that Blogger is currently broken when running the Spanish (Latin America) language version of Firefox on Linux. I was unable to log in to edit this blog; I finally had to use the English version of Firefox on Windows XP to publish this blog.



- Sam

MaraDNS snapshot update: Better upstream/root_servers error handling

I have just updated the MaraDNS 1.3 snapshot to have better handling of syntax errors and missed entries when setting upstream_servers or root_servers. The updated snapshot can be downloaded here; select the 20070106 snapshot.

- Sam

OK, I'm moving updates to this blog

As I was writing up yet another minor update for MaraDNS to the MaraDNS mailing list, I realized that many users may not find such information useful. Hence, I am starting up this blog so people can be current with any development changes to MaraDNS, no matter how small.

The list will now be used for MaraDNS support, and for announcing new version of MaraDNS suitable for including with distributions (such as the 1.2.12 branch of MaraDNS).

This way, people who wish to can be updated on MaraDNS, and people on the mailing list will only see really important MaraDNS announcments.

- Sam