Monday, February 16, 2009

Deadwood and MaraDNS snapshot updates

Now that I have done the work XeroBank requested of me, I am getting back to working on Deadwood. I am working on adding basic buffering to the TCP forwarder, so that Deadwood can handle both UDP packets (with DwMain) and the occasional TCP packet (with DwTcp). DwTcp is a general purpose TCP load balancer/forwarder that happens to use the same configuration file as DwMain, allowing it to forward (but not cache) DNS replies, or handle any other kind of TCP data.

It can be downloaded at this location
I have gotten a generous donation to help with MaraDNS development from Chirado OHG, a German consulting firm specializing in the design, implementation, and maintenance of secure IT systems and processes that comply with ISO 27001. I appreciate their generosity, and have added them to the MaraDNS sponsors web page.

Right now, the only unsponsored MaraDNS development I will perform is applying the occasional patch someone gives me and fixing security bugs in MaraDNS. The only supported platform for MaraDNS and Deadwood development is CentOS 5; since this platform will continue to be supported for five more years, this will be the primary development platform for MaraDNS and Deadwood until early 2014. Assistance with using MaraDNS on other platforms will be provided only if one is willing to help sponsor MaraDNS development

William Summers provided me with an OpenBSD patch for MaraDNS last week, which I have finally downloaded in to my 32-bit CentOS 5 VMware virtual machine (in a moment of foolishness, I decided to use Ubuntu 8.10 as my host operating system but all my real work is done in Windows XP and CentOS virtual machines). I will look at this patch in the next day or so.

In the meantime, I have a new MaraDNS snapshot that removes all warnings when compiled with -Wall in Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit (Yes, CentOS 5 is the only supported platform, but I do try to keep my code portable since there's a lot of diversity in the free software jungle), and adds Chirado OHG to the list of MaraDNS sponsors. It can be downloaded at this link.