Hello!
We are proud to announce the first alpha release of dnsdist 1.7.0. This release contains several new exciting features, as well as improvements and bug fixes.
In our view, the most exciting new feature is the support of outgoing DNS over TLS and DNS over HTTPS, as well as the ability to do “cross-protocol” queries, meaning a query received over a given protocol (UDP, TCP, DoT, DoH, …) can be forwarded over a different one. Now that dnsdist is capable of contacting its backend over an encrypted channel, full end-to-end encryption is possible, offering improved confidentiality and integrity.
This release also reduces the memory footprint of dnsdist in several places, which makes it easier to use in resource-constrained environments.
We added support for generating the still experimental SVCB and HTTPS records directly from dnsdist, offering potential benefits to both performance and privacy.
Our LMDB code has gained the ability to do range-based lookups, and is now more performant even for simple lookups.
Extending the per-thread custom load-balancing policies introduced in 1.6.0, it is now possible to write blazing-fast, lock-less per-thread custom actions using the Lua foreign function interface.
Dimitrios Mavrommatis improved the handling of AXFR and IXFR queries, making it possible to reuse a TCP connection used for a zone transfer much more efficiently.
Holger Hoffstätte also improved the reporting of an unavailable backend, making sure the existing metrics are no longer reported to prevent any confusion.
Please see the dnsdist website for the more complete changelog and the current documentation.
Please send us all feedback and issues you might have via the mailing list, or in case of a bug, via GitHub.
Release tarballs are available on the downloads website, and packages for CentOS 7 and 8, Debian Buster, Bullseye, and Ubuntu Bionic and Focal are available from our repository.
With the future 1.7.0 final release, the 1.4.x releases will be EOL and the 1.5.x releases will go into critical security fixes only mode.
Finally, we would like to thank the PowerDNS community and all external contributors for their great work in this release!
