PowerDNS Recursor 5.1.0-rc1 Released

We are proud to announce the first release candidate of PowerDNS Recursor 5.1.0!

Compared to the latest 5.0 release, this release adds the possibility to include settings previously set in the Lua configuration file in the YAML configuration format that was introduced in the previous release. See YAML settings for details on the settings and the conversion of existing Lua configuration to the new YAML syntax. The existing Lua syntax is still supported.

This release also includes the following changes:

• The recursor.conf configuration file may contain YAML configuration syntax and new installs using our packages from repo.powerdns.com will install a configuration using YAML syntax. Note to third-party package maintainers: please start doing the same.
• A feature to allow names (resolved by the system resolver) in addition to IP addresses in the forwarding configuration . This is very useful in setups where where the forwarding target addresses are dynamic in nature.
• Measures to handle slow authoritative servers have been improved. Under load, the Recursor will gradually reduce the time it is willing to wait for answers from authoritative servers.
• A structured logging backend that uses JSON representation has been added.
• Notifies can now be used to trigger RPZ freshness checks.
• The Newly Observed Domain (and/or Unique Domain Response) database is now shared between threads, avoiding multiple copies in memory and on disk. It is now also possible to set the snapshot interval.
• Structured logging is now enabled always, it is no longer possible to switch to old style logging.
• arm64 packages are being published for specific distributions.

As always, there are also many smaller bug fixes and improvements, please refer to the changelog for additional details. When upgrading do not forget to check the upgrade guide.

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

The tarball (signature) is available from our download server and packages for several distributions are available from our repository.

We also made changes to our Open Source End of Life policy. Older release trains are now supported for one year after the following major release. Consult the EOL policy for more details.

We would also like to mention that with the 4.5 release we stopped supporting systems using 32-bit time. This includes many 32-bit Linux platforms.

We are grateful to the PowerDNS community for the reporting of bugs, issues, feature requests, and especially to the submitters of fixes and implementations of features.