PowerDNS flexible, fast DNS Server

I’ve recently been testing/installing PowerDNS for a web hosting provider. Man am I impressed. You have a number of options to choose for a backend to PowerDNS, my choice is the mysql (gmysql) backend. The DNS server basically relies on a MySQL server to store all of the data. Why is this so great you ask? You can then replicate this SQL data to a number of other DNS servers, across the datacenter or across the country.

The one feature I had a hard time implementing was the “supermaster” or “superslave” feature. This allows another server to be the “supermaster” server, thus allowing zone transfers (axfr) from this other server. I had to dig for this info so I hope someone else finds it helpful.

You need to add an entry into the “supermasters” table (this goes for the mysql and pgsql backends):
insert into supermasters ("10.0.0.11","ns1.yourserver.com","internal");
From then on, notifies from this supermaster IP including the ns record “ns1.yourserver.com” will
will lead to the provisioning of a slave domain under the account “internal” or other account of your choosing.

Once you have powerDNS set up, try using PowerAdmin for a GUI frontend to PowerDNS. It works great and gives you a nice interface to work with (no more editing those ugly named conf files!)