From owner-freebsd-isp Tue Oct 1 6:22:44 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8B4B737B401 for ; Tue, 1 Oct 2002 06:22:43 -0700 (PDT) Received: from Thanatos.Shenton.Org (a3.ebbed1.client.atlantech.net [209.190.235.163]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 632DD43E4A for ; Tue, 1 Oct 2002 06:22:42 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from chris@Shenton.Org) Received: (qmail 38249 invoked by uid 1000); 1 Oct 2002 13:22:40 -0000 To: "Leigh V" Cc: "Dave [Hawk-Systems]" , "Jan Knepper" , "FreeBSD ISP" Subject: Re: DNS (bind or djbdns or ???) References: <006801c268f4$ec722e10$2d01a8c0@michael> From: Chris Shenton Date: 01 Oct 2002 09:22:40 -0400 In-Reply-To: <006801c268f4$ec722e10$2d01a8c0@michael> Message-ID: <87fzvqguov.fsf@thanatos.shenton.org> Lines: 37 User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org "Leigh V" writes: > but I found that DJBDNS is far worse because you have to recompile the whole > database file everytime you change something and with 1000 domains each > having there own stack of records, restarting bind is much faster result. I'm a long time BIND user but switched to DJBDNS a couple years back and prefer it. I hope to avoid a religious mire here and provide some useful hints. For BIND to read changes in the zone files, it requires a reload (ndc or kill -HUP) but it stops answering queries while it reads and parses the zone files. That downtime can be a drag with large zone datasets. When you change a record, DJBDNS requires you to rebuild the zones' CDB (a read-optimized, constant-time database) which the data is being served from, but the nameserver continues to answer queries while this is happening. This is an especially good thing when you have a lot of zone data like you do. You don't need to restart or reload the daemon itself, very nice. (Russ Nelson's "axfr" is handy for managing lots of zones: it pulls zones you secondary, aggregates other zones in individual files, then creates the CDB for you.) WRT the original question about daemontools: yes. You need this as well as the ucspi-tcp package; both are in ports and build trivially. Setup is a little confusing cuz it's different, but there's good advice on www.lifewithdjbdns.org. Daemontools allows you to stop, start, pause, reset, and query daemons -- quite nice. The ucspi-tcp stuff grabs the TCP connections, does resource limiting, then handles the file descriptor to the intended service so the service itself doesn't have to implement this -- it just reads/writes stdin/stdout -- making the service smaller and therefore less complicated (and presumably more secure). Getting your head around these meta-services takes some time but it's very nice once you get it going. As to others' posts about DJB being a difficult person, I agree. But it sure makes the lists more lively. :-) I do like his code though. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message