Power DNS : What is Power DNS

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xkp8pLDqn0

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What is Power DNS?

What were are demoing here is an Authoritative DNS server.

Power DNS server is an Authoritative DNS server . Meaning it is not a recursive name server . It hosts DNS zone data which is your data . A recursive name server is used by your clients which they may use to query other peoples DNS data .

Power DNS is produced by the Power BV company located in the Netherlands it dates back to 1999 when it started.

This company has merged with Open exchange guys and this company is a part of open exchange team

One unique feature of these PowerDNS is it has these plug-able backends . There is a GeoIP backend which can be used to respond to different data depending on the Geo Location the IP Address from where it is coming from that is heavily used for bigger installations that want to distribute the IP addresses .

A bigger user of GeoIP backend is Wikipedia.

You can store the DNS zone data in the LDAP database

Interesting some backends can be mixed though there are some limitations

For example you can have static zone entries from BIND backend or an SQL database backend and then have some other record types which is servered by the which is the JSON

In Power DNS it will query each backend in order the order is been configured in the configuration file until it finds an answer or until the list of the backends are exhausted and then the data is not there then no data is returned.

Now every time hiting a database or a remote backend for a query will be slow will not be the fastest name server in the world. PowerDNS has intelligent caching is the same name server is queried again it will return a answer from the cache.

How to configure the PowerDNS to configure the BIND Backend ?

The Bind backend are for administrators who are familiar with Bind name server, you can even use bind configuration file.

$ less /etc/powerdns/pdns.conf

Power dns has its own supervisor who takes care that the power DNS does not stop , doesn't crash, doesn't restart .

We just have the bind backend . It is the Master server we have the IPv4 , IPv6 addresses configured where the name server will listening on. And the configuration for Bind Backend are just two lines. It is the location of the named.conf file

it will check the named.conf file for any changes or zone file change for every five minutes. Should there be a change . It will reload the configuration or its zone.