PowerDNS (more or less BIND compatible) open source nameserver version 2.9.4 released

[bert hubert]

Dear bind-users,

After some discussions, Paul Vixie ventured that this list may in fact be an
appropriate forum for discussing PowerDNS's BIND compatibility mode. While
we're unsure of that, we do think that many readers here may be interested
in PowerDNS, if only in the interests of diversity.

To read more about PowerDNS, see http://doc.powerdns.com and for this list
especially, http://doc.powerdns.com/bindbackend.html and
http://doc.powerdns.com/pdns-internals.html#PDNSCONTROL with such
interesting commands as:

* notify domain

    Adds a domain to the notification list, causing PDNS to send out
    notifications to the nameservers of a domain. Can be used if a slave
    missed previous notifications or is generally hard of hearing.

* notify-host domain host

    Same as above but with operator specified IP address as destination, to
    be used if you know better than PowerDNS. 

* retrieve domain

    Retrieve a slave domain from its master. Done nearly immediatly. 

Regarding 2.9.4:

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.