PowerDNS is a free and open-source authoritative DNS server that can be used in place of the standard BIND DNS server. It provides better performance while requiring less memory.
On top of that, PowerDNS has a significant advantage in that, in addition to the conventional basic zone files, it supports a wide range of backends such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, LDAP, LMDB, and others.
The new just-released PowerdDNS 4.7 brings some improvements and new features, so let’s look at them.
PowerdDNS 4.7 Highlights
Until now, BIND users could use the Catalog Zones functionality, but this feature was lacking in PowerDNS. However, since version 4.7, PowerDNS now supports Catalog Zones.
DNS Catalog Zones is a mechanism for representing a catalog of zones as a conventional DNS zone and transferring it using DNS zone transfers. In other words, it is a feature allowing easy provisioning of zones to secondary DNS servers.
So, when zones are added or deleted from the PowerDNS Catalog Zone, the changes are automatically replicated to the secondary nameservers.
PowerDNS 4.7 also reintroduces GSS-TSIG support, which was removed for quality reasons and has since been rewritten with several stability improvements.
Furthermore, the new version includes improvements to the use of LUA records. These records include short pieces of configuration that enable dynamic behavior based on the IP address of the requester.
The LUA improvements are mainly focused on speed. So, LUA records can now re-use an LUA state when queried over TCP, providing a significant performance boost.
On top of that, there is a new LUA ifurlextup function. It is similar to ifurlup, but the returned IPs are not linked to their external health check URLs. This is beneficial when health checks are already performed elsewhere, and the state is available over HTTP(S).
Finally, the LMDB backend databases now have a UUID, making it easy for external software to determine if a database was completely rebuilt. In addition, it now has the option of using random IDs for objects.
You can refer to the change log for detailed information about all changes in PowerDNS 4.7.
