Welcome to 2008!

Just letting people know I've finally caught up on my MaraDNS support emails; a couple of requests for better dangling CNAME handling, of all things. The real solution is this: If you're going to have dangling CNAME records, use a different DNS server for recursive resolving than authoritative resolving (1.3's ability to slice up the recursive space makes these kinds of setups easier).

Welcome to 2008 everyone! One of my resolutions is MaraDNS 2.0, which will not allow the same IP to be both authoritative and recursive, and that will have a completely rewritten recursive resolver.

- Sam

My Christmas gift

I'm giving everyone on the internet, for Christmas, a new stable release of MaraDNS: 1.3.07.08. This is a stable release; after over six months of testing, I feel comfortable declaring this branch the new stable branch of MaraDNS. This branch has a few new features compared to 1.2, most notably BIND zone file support.

I haven't uploaded it to Sourceforge yet, but it can be downloaded at the official web site.

I will support 1.2 until the end of 2010. Unlike 1.0, there will not be a "security fixes only" period of support. Both security and other critical bugs will be fixed for three more years. 1.0 is now only available as an indirect link from the download page and is only supported for critical security fixes.

I hope to answer the support email piling up in the next few days. The holidays are pretty hectic, however, so I can't guarantee anything.

- Sam

Merry Christmas everyone

Just letting people know that Christmas plans with family were more hectic than I thought they would be; I haven't had a chance to answer any support email or make the 1.3.07 stable release Friday the way I planned to. I will release 1.3.07 stable later on today, and will answer emails in the next few days.

- Sam

Quick MaraDNS support update

I'm madly getting ready for my trip to the US tomorrow; I haven't had time to answer the MaraDNS email that has been building up this week. I should, hopefully, have time Thursday to answer it. We'll see. Right now, I have three unanswered MaraDNS support emails, and one non-MaraDNS support email unanswered.

Thank you, everyone, for your patience, and for your interest in MaraDNS and my other geek projects.

- Sam

MaraDNS snapshot update

Up until today (yesterday on my laptop), when Deadwood-2 tried to connect to an upstream server, and the server didn't respond, Deadwood would just drop the packet on the ground, and the DNS resolver would have to send another packet.

No longer.

When the upstream DNS server doesn't respond, instead of just dropping the packet on the floor, Deadwood 2 now tries harder to give the client something they can use.

First, Deadwood tries contacting a DNS server again. Should the DNS server not reply again, then Deadwood starts trying extreme measures. Maybe there is an expired copy of the record in question in the cache; if so, we give that record to the end user. If not, then, as a last resort, we give the client a SERVER FAIL response so they know something is up.

All of this can be adjusted by dwood2rc parameters, which are documented.

It can be downloaded, as always, here.


- Sam

MaraDNS 1.2.12.09 release; snapshot update

I have uploaded MaraDNS 1.2.12.09 today. This backports some minor bugfixes in the 1.3 branch to the 1.2 branch. Also, the ICANN root server list is updated. Since there are no critical bugs fixed in this, I will continue to support 1.2.12.08 for a few more months, in order to give distributions time to update to 1.2.12.09. Here

I have also uploaded an updated snapshot for the development version of MaraDNS, available here

MaraDNS snapshot update

I have updated the development branch of MaraDNS today; I fixed a bug with the saving of the cache to a file, where it would not work if chroot_dir was not the current working directory; I also applied some minor fixes to the code contributed by Sarton. It can be downloaded here.

- Sam

MaraDNS snapshot update; Sarton's MaraDNS release

I have uploaded a new snapshot of MaraDNS today. This snapshot properly handles NXDOMAIN replies, and should handle truncation properly. In addition, it supports writing the cache to a file, and reading the cache from said file, and the user-id and group-id Deadwood-2 run as are now configurable in the dood2rc file. It is available here.

In addition, Sarton has made his own 1.3 release of MaraDNS, which is available here.

- Sam

Snapshot update: Deadwood-2 now has a working cache

I have been sick and pretty much laying in bed playing video games and working on MaraDNS the last three days.

Deadwood-2 is now a fully functional caching non-recursive DNS server. There's a lot of work still to be done, but we now have caching. Look at the code (and the TODO) in today's snapshot of MaraDNS.

In addition, Jean-Jacques Sarton has contributed a couple of bug fixes to some of the SQA tests.

The snapshot can be downloaded here.

- Sam

New MaraDNS snapshot; ObHack update

Just letting everyone know that, even though I was distracted by excellent GPL free video game Wesnoth and updating ObHack, I still made a little progress with the Deadwood-2 client. It's a little closer to being a non-recursive DNS cache that will, yes, have support for reading and writing the cache to a file (the file writing and reading code has already been written).

It can be downloaded here

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I have also updated ObHack, adding two new features: You can now choose how inddors or outdoors the randomly generated map is, and you can choose to have an inital weapon (this is mainly for balancing mini deathmatch maps).