MaraDNS 1.4.04 released

Now that Deadwood is feature-complete, I have released MaraDNS 1.4.04. This is the most current stable release of MaraDNS; if using an older MaraDNS, please update to this release (yes, I ran a bunch of SQA tests so anything that worked before should work in 1.4.04).

While the old recursive code is still in place to allow people to slowly make the transition to using Deadwood as their recursive DNS server, Deadwood 2.9.02 is included. The Windows version of MaraDNS has had its documentation updated to encourage people to use Deadwood for recursion instead of MaraDNS; I will also start nudging *NIX users along.

I have also, as blogged about yesterday, made a tool for getting entropy from the OS and putting it in a file. This is currently a very simple tool; it makes a random 64-byte file called secret.txt which MaraDNS and Deadwood can use. It acts like a UNIX command: There is no user interface; when it is run, it just silently creates the 64-byte random secret.txt file, overwriting any already existing secret.txt, and only outputting something if something goes wrong.

It’s a lot better than the old “just type in some random text to make secret.txt” directions I have given. I plan on making it a little more friendly (failing if secret.txt already exists, and stating the secret.txt file has been created, and always pausing and having the user hit a key so they know what the program is doing if called from the GUI.)

In addition, I fixed the bug with delegation NS records and ANY queries, as well as incorporating a NAPTR bugfix I made a few months ago in to the code. There is a full changelog.

It can be looked at here:

http://maradns.org/download.html

Or here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/maradns

Deadwood and MaraDNS now have a Windows tool for making secret.txt

Deadwood and MaraDNS now both have a tool for getting entropy (random numbers) so that the file secret.txt is automatically generated. I call the tool "mkSecretTxt", and its source code can be looked at here:

http://samiam.org/software/mkSecretTxt.txt

Or downloaded as a C source file here:

http://samiam.org/software/mkSecretTxt.c

The file is a Windows port of the following *NIX command:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=secret.txt bs=64 count=1

In English: My program creates a 512-bit (64-byte) file called “secret.txt” using CryptGenRandom() to acquire the entropy from the Windows operating system.

This tool will make it easier for people to install and use MaraDNS and Deadwood in Windows, since they only have to run this program once to get some entropy for the servers’ random number generators.

Deadwood 2.9.02 released ; keep on testing guys

I have released Deadwood 2.9.02 today. This is Deadwood 2.9.01 with bugfixes and documentation improvements. In more detail, here are the changes since 2.9.01:

• Script to apply patches against one version of Deadwood to make the next Deadwood release made (based on similar MaraDNS script; this is something I have implemented now that the code is feature-complete and ready for general testing)
• INSTALL.txt updated to not mention DwMain (Deadwood's older name; issue reported on mailing list)
• DW_MAXIPS increased to 128 (issue reported on mailing list)
• Spurious debug message removed
• Documentation updates (root_servers more fully described in man page; more questions and answers added to FAQ; fixes things I saw myself and reported on mailing list)
• Bug reporting policy update (you better have a stack trace or be able to reproduce a crash; otherwise I can’t use the bug report. No current issue; but I have had stuff like this with MaraDNS. Any joker can pretend Deadwood is crashing, but I won’t believe you without proof)
• Issue getting “SERVER FAIL” when AAAA query points to non-existent AAAA fixed. (Reported on mailing list)
• Issue when we get a “a.kabah.foo CNAME b.kabah.foo ; c.kabah.foo A 10.2.3.4” packet (where “b.kabah.foo” is a CNAME for “c.kabah.foo”) fixed. (Found this one during my own “dogfood” testing of Deadwood)
• Deadwood for Windows now built using MinGW 3.4.2 instead of MinGW 3.1.0 (issue found by myself and discussed on mailing list)

It can be downloaded here:

http://maradns.org/deadwood/testing/

As an aside, now that I’m visibly actively working with users again so we can find and fix bugs together, I have been getting a lot more private email asking for MaraDNS support. I don’t mind this email (I’ve come to accept it’s a natural consequence of MaraDNS becoming popular), but you’re going to get the “pay me or take it to the list” form reply (I’ve come to accept people will occasionally get all worked up I don’t provide free support; I forward such lusers [1] on to the list, like I warn people I may do in my form reply, for our collective amusement).

I hope some of the people sending me this kind of email pay me for MaraDNS support; I can use the money. Or better yet, get me a real job with a living wage. Now that MaraDNS 2.0’s recursive resolver is feature-complete, I hope to have time to master OOP, Java, and whatever other buzzwords I need on my resume to get the job to support my beautiful wife.

[1] Someone who doesn’t read the “no free private email support” disclaimer at the bottom of the MaraDNS web page, as well as on the webpage with my email address, not to mention at the bottom most postings I make to the mailing list, and then flames me in response to my form reply asking for money [2] gets a LART in the form of me going public with their email. Especially since the form reply says, very clearly at the top, that I may forward their email to the MaraDNS mailing list.

[2] It doesn’t just ask for money. It also lets them know they can get free support by posting it to the MaraDNS list.

Deadwood snapshot update

Since Deadwood is in beta-testing, the changes at this point will by and large be bug fixes. That in mind, I am going to start announcing Deadwood snapshot updates on my blog again, since they are more interesting for end users than “I’ve started work on converting the code to handle NS referrals”, “I’m making more progress on converting the code to handle NS referrals”, “I’m making more progress on converting the code to handle NS referrals. No, it doesn’t work yet, but, really, I’m making progress”, “Yet more progress on converting the code to handle NS referrals”, etc.

Today’s snapshop fixes the bug reported in a mailing list posting. [1]

I have fixed the bug, but I’m not 100% happy with the way I’m fixing it, as described in this mailing list posting.

Anyway, people can look at both the patch (in the “update” directory) and the patched Deadwood here:

http://maradns.org/deadwood/snap/deadwood-H-20100728-1.tar.bz2

Update: I have updated this with a better patch that, instead of deciding all SOA records are always “in bailiwick”, has it so bailiwick tests are only done if the record is determined to be a NS referral. See here:

http://maradns.org/deadwood/snap/deadwood-H-20100728-2.tar.bz2

- Sam

[1] The guys at Marc.info need to fix things to recognize a name on the From: line is UTF-8 encoded when it says it’s UTF-8 encoded. “From: =?UTF-8?B?U2ViYXN0aWFuIE3DvGxsZXI=?=” is “Sebastian Müller”, not “Sebastian Müller”.

Upstream replies to Debian bugs

Since a number of MaraDNS users use the Debian bug tracking system to report MaraDNS bugs, I have just gone through a number of old Debian bugs. The ones with distribution-specific issues I have ignored, but here are my replies to issues I, as upstream, are responsible for:

Bug 477787: MaraDNS 2.0 will have full IPv6 support. I have just made a beta-test release of the relevant code (MaraDNS 2.0's up-and-coming recursor, Deadwood) and encourage people to test it and report bugs on the MaraDNS mailing list.

Bug 484466: If MaraDNS is run using the duende daemonizer, sending MaraDNS a HUP signal will stop and restart MaraDNS, reloading all configuration and zone files.

Bug 486497: It's a really bad idea to bind MaraDNS to 0.0.0.0, but if you insist on doing it, it can be done if csv2_synthip_list is set.

Bug 507591: This issue was never present in MaraDNS 1.2, and has been fixed in MaraDNS 1.3.07.10 and MaraDNS 1.4.03. If Debian versions of MaraDNS still have this bug, they need to incorporate my fix, or, better yet, upgrade to 1.3.07.10 or 1.4.03.

Bug 525188: Just this last day, I have released Deadwood 2.9.01, which is the daemon that will become MaraDNS 2.0's recursive resolver. This daemon fixes a number of long-standing issues MaraDNS 1.0's recursive resolver has, including CNAMEs pointing to AAAA records.

This particular issue is one that I will not fix in MaraDNS 1.x (IPv6 does not have wide adoption yet, and MaraDNS 2.0 should be out there by the time it does), but it has already been fixed for MaraDNS 2.0.

Bug 573970: There are no plans to add this to the authoritative MaraDNS code, but the up-and-coming MaraDNS 2.0 release will use a separate daemon for recursion called Deadwood (I just released the first beta-test version of this daemon this last day), which does support "includes" via Python-compatible execfile("filename") syntax.

All other bugs appear to be Debian-specific OS issues. The next time I look at Debian bugs will probably be in a year or two.

Deadwood 2.9.01 released: Full recursion

I have just released Deadwood 2.9.01. This is the first release of the fully recursive Deadwood; Deadwood no longer needs an upstream server performing the “heavy lifting” of recursive DNS.

I have done a lot of “web surfing” testing with Deadwood; I have fixed enough bugs that Deadwood can be used for casual web surfing. Indeed, I am using Deadwood to post this blog right now and the issues I saw before (tagged.com, etc.) are no longer a problem.

This is a testing release. That now has a different meaning than my previous definition of a testing release. All of the features Deadwood 3.0 (MaraDNS 2.0) will have are already implemented. At this point, the program needs testing (expansion of the SQA regressions to handle recursion, etc.) and documentation (root_servers hasn’t been documented yet) updates.

It has been a long road to get here. I have wanted to rewrite MaraDNS’ recursive resolver since 2002; I started writing Deadwood in 2007 and it’s finally feature-complete here in 2010.

Deadwood 2.9.01 can be downloaded as source code and Windows binaries here:

maradns.org/deadwood/testing/

I encourage people to test Deadwood and make bug reports. Some things to keep in mind:

• Valgrind-reported memory leaks can always be reported. Valgrind-reported errors are only valid if Deadwood is compiled with -DVALGRIND_NOERRORS
• The only officially supported OSes are Windows XP and CentOS 5. OS-specific issues such as startup, daemonizing, sysloggin, and /etc/resolv.conf setup are only supported on these two OSes.
• Bugs need to be reported to the MaraDNS list, not to my email account nor as blog comments. I hope to have time to set up a web forum for MaraDNS/Deadwood support for people not comfortable with mailing lists, but no promises.

Firefox does pretty agressive DNS pre-fetching

As I am performing some real-world testing with the (hopefully) soon-to-be-released Deadwood 2.9.01, I discovered something interesting that Firefox does.

The copy of Firefox 3.6.4 I have [1] in CentOS 5 looks at all of the links on a given page I am reading, and uses DNS to look up the hostnames of all of the links. This way, if I click on a given link, I don’t have to wait for the DNS lookup to be performed. I can see why Firefox implemented this.

Anyway, I usually don‘t announce snapshots here, but I am very pleased that Deadwood is finally, after nearly three years, a fully recursive DNS server. Snapshots are here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/

Look in the snap directory for the latest snapshot.

Todo before releasing Deadwood 2.9.01:

• Make a quick Deadwood FAQ
• The usual Deadwood SQA regressions I do before any release

(Footnote follows)

[1] Yes, I know, the current version is Firefox 3.6.7, but I’m using CentOS 5, whose most current version of Firefox is 3.6.4. Out-of-date versions of programs is a very common problem in Linux, since the distributor of a given program has to approve and then send a program downstream before the users of the distribution get the update. It’s worse with CentOS, where a given update has to get approved by RedHat, then, in turn, processed by CentOS before it gets here.

One issue I have had a lot with MaraDNS is that people sometimes email me or post to the mailing list bug reports for issues I have already fixed, but the user in question is using the version of MaraDNS that comes with Debian or whatever, which hasn’t been updated.