Creating Secondary (and Tertiary) Servers

Now that you have created a primary server and it is up and running, you have more work to do to create true redundancy. As I said before, having any single point of failure (SPOF) is always unwise. To that end, you have a number of ways to create a secondary server. Because of scope constraints and the well-documented [10] [11] nature of the project, I'm sure you will be able to add secondary and tertiary servers as needed.

PowerDNS Community and Support Options

As with most open source projects, support is available along many avenues. PowerDNS is supported by its community via mailing lists, forums, IRC [12], an ecosystem of partners and professional service organizations, and even direct commercial support from PowerDNS BV [13]. Often, commercial backing helps breathe life, at least in the form of resources and community support, into an open source project; this is certainly the case with PowerDNS. High-quality community and corporate support make this project great for users of any stripe – corporate or otherwise. Open source projects thrive when individuals become involved, and PowerDNS has a host of opportunities, including:

• Reviving OS X support
• Resolving Solaris package problems
• Testing back ends
• Writing regression tests [14]
• Collecting and documenting the plethora of web front ends
• Managing tickets: verifying that bugs reported for old versions still apply to new versions, making unclear tickets clear, and writing patches
• Choosing among the many other to-do list items [15]

If you are so inclined, these tasks offer a great way to get involved in a cool FOSS project. Learning opportunities abound, and your contributions will improve the critical infrastructure of today's Internet.

I hope this short article whets your appetite to explore this powerful, feature-rich, and flexible DNS software. Happy Hacking!