Switching from bind to PowerDNS.

Introduction

Because I am using vservers using bind was not really an option in my setup (there are ways to use bind within vservers, however I wanted a clean setup that is easily maintained). I therefor decided to run PowerDNS within my vservers. I did my installation on Gentoo but it can be easily adapted to any distro of choice.

Installation

Gentoo:

emerge sync && emerge pdns && rc-update add pdns default

Configuration

After the installation has been finished, we need to configure PowerDNS to use the SysCP generated config... All relevant settings can be found below:

/etc/pdns.conf

#################################
# allow-axfr-ips        If disabled, DO allow zonetransfers from these IP addresses
#
allow-axfr-ips=(TRUSTED AXFR HOSTS HERE)

#################################
# daemon        Operate as a daemon
#
daemon=yes

#################################
# disable-axfr  Disable zonetransfers but do allow TCP queries
#
disable-axfr=no

#################################
# guardian      Run within a guardian process
#
guardian=yes

#################################
# launch        Which backends to launch and order to query them in
#
launch=bind

#################################
# bind Backend Settings
#
# Location of the Bind configuration file to parse.
bind-config=/etc/bind/named.conf
# How often to check for zone changes. See 'Operation' section.
bind-check-interval=300
# Enable Huffman compression on zone data.
bind-enable-huffman=no


#################################
# local-address Local IP address to which we bind
#
local-address=(YOUR IP HERE)

#################################
# local-port    The port on which we listen
#
local-port=53

#################################
# master        Act as a master
#
master=yes

#################################
# recursor      If recursion is desired, IP address of a recursing nameserver
#
recursor=no

#################################
# slave Act as a slave
#
slave=no

#################################
# socket-dir    Where the controlsocket will live
#
socket-dir=/var/run

Running powerdns

Start powerdns and perform the usual checks to see if all works well.

Gentoo:

/etc/init.d/pdns start

Added functionality

On a side note; I created a small cron script to change the SOA on a daily basis, required if you move your vhosts around from one server to another for example (the script runs from cron.daily):

/etc/cron.daily/update-soa.cron

### Remove stale lockfile for SysCP - if needed
rm -f /var/run/syscp_cron.lock* 2>/dev/null

### Update SOA serial for the default.zone file
ZONEFILE=/etc/bind/default.zone
if [ -f $ZONEFILE ]; then
        cp -a $ZONEFILE $ZONEFILE.new   ;# Copy original file for permissions
        sed s/'\t'.*\ \;\ serial/'\t'`date +%Y%m%d01`\ \;\ serial/ $ZONEFILE > $ZONEFILE.new
        mv $ZONEFILE.new $ZONEFILE
fi

Comments

If you encounter problems, or have suggestions (perhaps an update on how to setup powerdns on Debian), either post in the forum, or modify this wiki entry.