pdnsd

A memory leak and a minor buffer overflow problem have been fixed. There is now a fix for some situations that would previously cause pdnsd to exit prematurely (such as ACPI S3 sleep or trying to attach strace to pdnsd). Time intervals specified in the configuration file can now be expressed in minutes, hours, days, and weeks as well as seconds. Support for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger has been improved. The "pdnsd-ctl status" command now also provides some information about the status of the running threads.

The "pdnsd-ctl empty-cache" command has been
improved: it is possible to specify a selection of
names to delete instead of emptying the cache
completely and pdnsd should remain responsive
while a "pdnsd-ctl empty-cache" command is
running. "pdnsd-ctl config" or server commands
should no longer be held up by ping or query
uptests to unresponsive servers. It should now be
possible to resolve the same names with
query_method=tcp_udp as with
query_method=udp_only, though perhaps with an
occasional delay when a TCP query times out. A
number of problems with resolving from root
servers have been solved.

The emphasis in this release is on improved portability. A bug has been fixed that prevented pdnsd from compiling successfully on some 64-bit architectures. This release has (experimental) support for the Darwin (Apple Mac OS X) platform. On Linux systems, the configure script will now try to detect automatically whether the system implements the Native POSIX Thread Library (may not be foolproof yet). A new configure option makes it possible to specify a different number of hash buckets without editing the source files. In addition, this release has enhanced debugging features.

Two bugs that could cause a crash when handling NXT or NAPTR records have been fixed. New features include a new server availability test, support for reading the DNS configuration from resolv.conf files, a new option for optimizing the use of root servers, a new option that makes defining local records for reverse resolving easier, support for defining wildcard records, a new pdnsd-ctl command for reloading the configuration file without restarting pdnsd, a new pdnsd-ctl command for dumping the contents of the cache, a pdnsd.conf man page, and support for the Cygwin platform.

Among the bugs fixed are a race condition in the
cache lookup code, a flaw in the code that caused
a busy spin in case of a "Not Implemented"
response, and problems with the -4 and -6
command-line options. Among the improvements are
an alternative sorting algorithm which should
allow pdnsd to start up faster when reading a
large cache file, automatic mapping of IPv4 to
IPv6 addresses in IPv6 mode, somewhat more
efficient memory use, better compression of the
replies, and changes in the parallel querying
algorithm that should improve the chances of
catching a reply from a remote server.