MaraDNS
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| MaraDNS | |
| Developer: | Sam Trenholme |
|---|---|
| Latest release: | 1.2.12.04 / November 24, 2006 |
| OS: | Unix-like, Windows |
| Use: | DNS server |
| License: | BSD license |
| Website: | www.maradns.org |
MaraDNS is a security-aware Domain Name System (DNS) implementation. It can be configured as an authoritative DNS server, as a "recursive" DNS cache that uses the DNS root nameservers, or as a cache which obtains its information from other recursive DNS servers.
MaraDNS is a simple, modular DNS server; this modular design minimizes memory usage and makes debugging simpler. MaraDNS comes with extensive documentation, including a full tutorial.
After a 17 month development and testing cycle, including extensive stress testing of MaraDNS' recursive resolver, MaraDNS 1.0.00 was released on June 21, 2002. At this point, MaraDNS development slowed down but did not stop.
A number of features have been added to MaraDNS since 1.0.00, including a new DNS zone file format, the ability to host a large number of domains while using very little memory, better RFC compliance, and limited IPv6 support.
MaraDNS 1.2.00 was released on December 21, 2005. The stable version, as of November 24, 2006, is 1.2.12.04.
While 1.2 is almost fully compatible with 1.0 data files, 1.0 releases of MaraDNS will continue to be maintained until December 21, 2007.
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[edit] Criticisms
MaraDNS has limited support for being a slave DNS server. While MaraDNS includes a tool that can receive zone files, this process needs to be automated via an external program, such as crontab, and MaraDNS needs to be restarted to load the zone in question.
While MaraDNS can resolve almost any site that other DNS servers can resolve, it does not resolve all names the same way other DNS servers do. CNAME and ANY records, in particular, are resolved differently.
MaraDNS spawns a thread for each recursive DNS request that is not already cached.
[edit] Licensing
MaraDNS 1.0 releases (including all current bug fixes) have been released to the public domain. MaraDNS 1.2 releases are copyrighted but are distributed with a liberal licence (a simplified two-clause BSD licence) [1].
