[MaraDNS list] Deadwood usage guide
Sam Trenholme <[email protected]> Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:23:36 -0800
| Newsgroups | gmane.network.dns.maradns.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <CAJxgfkT42Z=qh3bBvLd7Sk-LTeLwTeqLSH566V92JLHcroRmKA@mail.gmail.com> |
Deadwood, MaraDNS 2.0's recursive resolver, has a number of useful features that resolves routine DNS headaches. One DNS headache is that a number of Linux applications request an IPv6 DNS record before falling back to an IPv4 record. There is no way to disable this in the system; each application that does this has to be patched. Or, one can use Deadwood to resolve IPs and have the following line in one's Deadwood configuration file: reject_aaaa = 1 Another *NIX annoyance are applications that perform a reverse DNS lookup, which can cause some applications to make you wait over a minute before there is a DNS timeout. These kinds of lookups can be stopped dead in their tracks with Deadwood: reject_ptr = 1 Another issue is malware. For example, a family member's computer has been infected with a virus that redirects Google results to spam-filled pages. The people responsible for this malware use a large number of different domains that all resolve to the same IP. Deadwood has support for having up to 1,000 different IPs in one's results black-listed; if we get a DNS reply with a black-listed IP, the reply is not sent to us. For example, the malware authors are currently using the IP 64.111.199.250 to host these unwanted redirects. To blacklist this, one can add this to one's dwood3rc file: ip_blacklist = "64.111.199.250" Once this is added, remove Deadwood's cache file (to do: Warn the user if the timestamp for the cache file is newer than the timestamp for the dwood3rc file), restart Deadwood, and malware domains listed by the IP will no longer work. These IPs are in a hash, so there is no slowdown having only one or having 900 such blacklisted IPs. Just some ways Deadwood, despite being a tiny 64k binary, can be useful. - Sam