Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Deadwood snapshot update: DwMain and DwTcp are now a single combined binary

In today's update to Deadwood, I have made DwMain and DwTcp a single combined binary. This combined binary is under 28k in size (when compiled with -Os and stripped on an x86 32-bit platform) and supports both DNS-over-UDP and has basic support for DNS-over-TCP. I have verified this combined binary compiles and works in both CentOS 5 and in Windows XP.

I have removed the DwTcp man page, and have noted in the DwMain man page that DwTcp is now nothing more than a symbolic link to DwMain (DwMain checks the name it is invoked as, and runs as a DNS-over-TCP daemon when invoked as "DwTcp").

In addition, I have added a security section to the DwMain man page that discusses security best practices for DwMain.

My next Deadwood task (after getting rid of the one or two compile-time-warnings when compiling in Windows) is to make DwMain a bona fide Windows service.

A couple months ago, when dealing with a problem with time slew in my VmWare virtual machine (which I subsequently solved by having VMware tools on the guest), I found a very simple public domain Windows service (complete with source code) that acts a rdate server. I will use code from this program to make DwMain a Windows service. I estimate I will need a couple of weeks to make this code happen; CentOS 5.3 will probably be released as I'm working on improving the Windows port.

It can be downloaded at maradns.org/deadwood/snap