Re: [djbdns] gdnsd DNSCurve update

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 3:46 PM, Jason 'XenoPhage' Frisvold
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Forgive my ignorance, but is gdnsd some sort of djb fork?  Or is it a
> completely different product with DNSCurve support?  I'm interested in
> DNSCurve, but I'm not aware of a djbdns implementation at this point..

No, gdnsd is not not a djb fork.  It's an original, separate codebase
licensed under the terms of the GPLv3.  It's also *only* an
authoritative server (i.e. it does the role of djb's "tinydns", but
not "dnscache").  The project originated in early 2007 as something I
wrote on Logitech's time because the department I worked for needed it
(long story, and this email is already going to be longer than you
want to read), and we decided to GPL it at the time because that was
the norm in that department, and because Logitech didn't have any
broader interest in a DNS server as a commercial software product of
any kind.

I'm still a full-time employee of Logitech, but the department I
worked for then doesn't exist anymore, and regardless said department
had mostly lost any commercial interest in spending time on further
improvements to the codebase sometime back in 2008.  Since then I've
been maintaining it publicly as a side project on my own.

It doesn't have a lot in common with djbdns in terms of implementation
details (e.g. it uses RCF1035 zonefiles, it uses pthreads, it uses the
GNU autotools for a build system, etc).  On the other hand, I myself
am a long-time djb and djbdns fan, and I agree with a lot of his
perspective on the DNS, and this writings on the subject were
certainly influential during the development of gdnsd.

Like Dan and many others, I'm not a believer in DNSSEC, and I think
DNSCurve is a viable alternative route to solving some of the DNS's
security problems.  As far as that goes, we need all the
interoperating implementations we can get if there's to be any hope of
DNSCurve getting any broader adoption.  So far it looks like gdnsd
will probably be the first to release a production-quality native
implementation in an authoritative DNS server (at least, that I've
heard of), but I hope it's not the last.

On the recursive cache side of things we've got Matthew's patches to
djb's dnscache as well as George Barwood's GbDns server that I'm aware
of, and whatever OpenDNS is running in production (I haven't really
tried to look, but it may in fact be the patched dnscache for all I
know).

-- Brandon