I was quite fed up with BIND (zonefile editing, serial number increasing, master/slave setups), so I was searching for alternatives to run Master/Slave DNS services. More or less randomly, I again came across PowerDNS. Again, because I have heard a couple of times that big providers quite often use it. So I decided to give it a go. On FreeBSD it’s quite easy. You just install it together with its MySQL modules, activate the modules in the configuration files, import the database schemata, and fill it with content. A script to import BIND zone files directly to the DB is also included. Couldn’t be easier.
Once you’ve set it up and got it running, you of course need a slave server as well. So all you got to do is either to install another PowerDNS/MySQL instance on another machine and connect it to the same database (you wouldn’t really want to do that), or connect it to a second MySQL server, which ideally is a replication slave of the first one. Then you have a fully redundant setup and don’t need to worry about failures of either of those. All DNS record changes go directly to the master DB server, which will be picked up by the slave in almost real time. Plus, you don’t need to worry about serial numbers. Change a record in the DB and this change will be published instantly.
If you fancy web interfaces, you can either go for an open source one, or you can write one on your own. As the DB structure of PowerDNS is kept very simple, it’s easy to add/modify records via script also. Do whatever you want and don’t worry about the stupid restrictions and configuration hurdles you used to run into when going for a BIND server.
