Lead Image © ladyann, 123RF.com

Exploring PowerDNS

Power Zone

Article from ADMIN 16/2013

By Joseph Guarino

PowerDNS is a secure, scalable, and reliable DNS server solution licensed under the GPL. We show you how to use BIND master zone configuration files to configure your PowerDNS server and how to create a primary server with a MySQL back end managed by a Poweradmin web GUI.

PowerDNS [1] is an amazing, feature-rich and versatile domain name system (DNS) server solution. Originally created by PowerDNS.com BV as a commercial product, it was later opened up and licensed under the GPL. Today, PowerDNS thrives with both commercial [2] and community contributions, making it an outstanding DNS server alternative.

DNS, of course, is the distributed, hierarchical naming system that allows us to map what would be IP addresses to much more humanly digestible addresses. Thankfully, we no longer live in the early days of the Arpanet (precursor to today's Internet), where we had to transfer large host files from node to node. Its compact codebase and focus on security, scalability, and reliability make PowerDNS a great nameserver choice; it is jam packed with features that would impress any network or sys admin (Table 1).

Table 1

PowerDNS Features

Authoritative DNS server (hosting)

Resolving DNS server (caching)

API to provision zones and records

DNSSEC support (as of 3.x)

Web-based management options

DNS data stored in plain text (BIND compatible)

IPv4 and IPv6, UDP/TCP, 100% compliant

...

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).