Bind, linux and resilience

11 Mar

Last month was a pleasant milestone for one of the servers I manage – the server is up for more than 1000 days and actively serving public DNS queries.

$ uptime
 19:52:37 up 1013 days,  2:44,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
$

The configurations on the device change on a weekly basis, the server serves a few thousand queries every hour. The queries served cover few tens of domains and reverse pointers for large IP blocks.

Given the amount of activity and the dynamism involved, this uptime shows the stability and resilience of the bind program and the underlying Ubuntu linux.

Despite being fully satisfied with bind, the latest one I am getting fascinated by is tiny-dns. Key take-aways from tiny-dns include ability to cache queries and being able to serve PTR/A records off the same configuration lines. Segmenting the responses based on originating (source) IP block is also quite simple in tiny-dns.

Hope to bring up a few production systems in tiny-dns to ensure that we have a choice.

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