PowerDNS 2.9.4 released

Available on http://downloads.powerdns.com and 
http://www.powerdns.com/downloads

Yet another grand release. Big news is the addition of a recursing
nameserver which has sprung into existence over the past week. It is in use
on several computers already but it is not ready for prime time. Complete
integration with PowerDNS is expected around 2.9.5, for now the recursor is
a separate program.

In preliminary tests, the recursor appears to be four times faster than BIND
9 on a naive benchmark starting from a cold cache. BIND 9 managed to get
through to some slower nameservers however, which were given up on by
PowerDNS. We will continue to tune the recursor. See [166]Section 11.3 for
further details.

The BIND Backend has also been tested (see the bind-domain-status item
below) rather heavily by several parties. After some discussion online, one
of the BIND authors ventured that the newsgroup comp.protocols.dns.bind may
now in fact be an appropriate venue for discussing PowerDNS. Since this
discussion, traffic to the PowerDNS pages has increased sixfold and shows no
signs of slowing down.

>From this, it is apparent that far more people are interested in PowerDNS
than yet know about it. So spread the word!

In other news, we now have a security page at [167]Section 1.4. Furthermore,
Maurice Nonnekes contributed an OpenBSD port! See
http://www.codeninja.nl/openbsd/powerdns/ for more details!

New features and improvements:

     * All SQL queries in the generic backends are now available for
       configuration. (Martin Klebermass/bert hubert). See [169]Section
       A.5.
     * A recursing nameserver! See [170]Section 11.3.
     * An incoming AXFR now only starts a backend zone replacement
       transaction after the first record arrived successfully, thus
       making sure no work is done when a remote nameserver is
       unable/unwilling to AXFR a zone to us.
     * Zoneparser error messages were improved slightly (thanks to Stef
       van Dessel for spotting this shortcoming)
     * XS4ALL's Erik Bos checked how PowerDNS reacted to a BIND
       installation with almost 60.000 domains, some of which with
       >100.000 records, and he discovered the pdns_control
       bind-domain-status command became very slow with larger numbers of
       domains. Fixed, 60.000 domains are now listed in under one second.
     * If a remote nameserver disconnects during an incoming AXFR, the
       update is now rolled back, unless the AXFR was properly
       terminated.
     * The migration chapter mentioned the use of deprecated backends.

   A tremendous number of bugs were discovered and fixed:

     * Zone parser would only accept $include and not $INCLUDE
     * Zone parser had problems with $lines with comments on the end
     * Wildcard ANY queries were broken (thanks Colemarcus for spotting
       this)
     * A connection failure with the Generic backends would lead to a
       powerdns reload (cast of many)
     * Generic backends had some semantic problems with slave support.
       Symptoms were oft-repeated notifications and transfers (thanks to
       Mark Bergsma for helping resolve this).
     * Solaris version compiles again. Thanks to Mohamed Lrhazi for
       reporting that it didn't.
     * Some UltraSPARC alignment fixes. Thanks to Mohamed Lrhazi for
       being helpful in spotting these. One problem is still outstanding,
       Mohamed sent a core dump that tells us where the problem is.
       Expect the fix to be in 2.9.5. Volunteers can grep the source for
       'UltraSPARC' to find where the problem is.
     * Our support of IPv6 on FreeBSD had phase of moon dependent bugs,
       fixed by Peter van Dijk.
     * Some crashes of and by pdns_control were fixed, thanks to Mark
       Bergsma for helping resolve these.
     * Outgoing AXFR in pdns installations with multiple loaded backends
       was broken (thanks to Stuart Walsh for reporting this).
     * A failed BIND Backend incoming AXFR would block the zone until it
       succeeded again.
     * Generic PostgreSQL backend wouldn't compile with newer libpq++,
       fixed by Julien Lemoine/SpeedBlue.
     * Potential bug (not observed) when listening on multiple interfaces
       fixed.
     * Some typos in manpages fixed (reported by Marco Davids).

-- 
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