Software Update: PowerDNS Recursor 4.3.0

PowerDNS is a dns server with a database as backend, which makes it easy to manage a large number of dns entries. The developers have previously decided to release the two parts that make up PowerDNS, a recursor and an authoritative name server, to allow for a faster and more targeted release of a new version, the developers said.

When you perform a dns lookup, a recursor initially starts asking the lookup query to a dns root server. This can then redirect to other servers, from where it can redirect to other servers and so on, until finally a server is reached that knows the answer or knows that the look-up is not possible. The latter can be the case if the name does not exist or the servers do not respond. The process of going through different authoritative servers is called recursion. The developers have released PowerDNS Recursor 4.3.0. The changes in this release are as follows:

PowerDNS Recursor 4.3.0 Released

Hello!,

We are proud to announce the release of PowerDNS Recursor 4.3.0.

Compared to the last release candidate, only two very minor issues were fixed.

Compared to the 4.2 release of PowerDNS Recursor, the most important features that were added are:

• A relaxed form of QName Minimization as described in rfc7816bis-01. This feature is enabled by default. See the documentation for more details.
• Dnstap support for outgoing queries to authoritative servers and the corresponding replies. See the documentation for more details.
• The recursor now processes a number of requests incoming over a TCP connection simultaneously and will return results (potentially) out-of-order. See the documentation for more details on how to tune this feature.
• Newly Observed Domain (NOD) functionality. See the documentation for information on how to make use of this feature.
• When the recursor is started by systemd, the recursor will no longer run as the root user. Instead, it will start as the pdns-recursor user. Make sure directories and files needed by your specific recursor setup are readable by this user. For non-systemd and non-chroot cases, the default directory for the control socket and pid file has changed to /var/run/pdns-recursor. The upgrade guide contains more information.

As usual, there were also many other smaller enhancements and bug fixes. Please refer to the changelog for details.

We want to thank everyone that contributed to the testing of the release candidates.

The tarball (signature) is available at downloads.powerdns.com and packages for CentOS 6, 7 and 8, Debian Stretch and Buster, Ubuntu Xenial and Bionic are available from repo.powerdns.com.

With this release, PowerDNS Recursor 4.0 will be become End-of-Life and PowerDNS Recursor 4.1 will only receive critical security updates. For details, see our EOL statement.

Please send us all feedback and issues you might have via the mailing list, or in case of a bug, via GitHub.