PowerDNS Blog

PowerDNS Authoritative Server 4.5.0 | PowerDNS Blog

Written by Peter van Dijk | Jul 13, 2021 4:00:00 AM

Hello!

PowerDNS Authoritative Server 4.5.0 was released today.

Version 4.5.0 mostly brings small improvements and fixes, but there are two notable new features:

  • The ‘zone cache’, which allows PowerDNS to keep a list of zones in memory, updated periodically. With this cache, PowerDNS can avoid hitting the database with queries for unknown domains. In some setups, and some attack scenarios, this can make a serious performance difference. Users of backends with dynamically generated zones may want to disable this or at least read the upgrade notes extremely carefully. Many thanks to Chris Hofstaedtler for implementing this. This work by Chris was supported by RcodeZero DNS.

  • Priority ordering in the AXFR queue in PowerDNS running as a secondary. Some users with a lot of domains (>100k) sometimes found real changes waiting behind signature refreshes on Thursdays. With the new ordering, those real changes can ‘skip the line’ and get deployed on your secondaries faster. Many thanks to Robin Geuze of TransIP for implementing this.

Since 4.5.0-beta1, the zone cache is enabled by default.

A full list of changes can be found in the changelog.

Please make sure to read the Upgrade Notes before upgrading.

With version 4.5.0, support for platforms with a time_t type smaller than 64 bits is dropped. This means that we do not build packages for Raspberry Pi OS.

The tarball (signature) is available at downloads.powerdns.com. Packages for various distributions are available from repo.powerdns.com.

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