Version 2.9.5 released!

http://www.powerdns.com/downloads

This version is almost entirely about recursion with major changes to both
the pdns recursor, which is renamed to 'pdns_recursor' and to the main
PowerDNS binary to make it interact better with the recursing component.

Sadly, due to [169]technical reasons, compiling the pdns recursor and pdns
authoritative nameserver into one binary is not immediately possible. During
the release of 2.9.4 we stated that the recursing nameserver would be
integrated in the next release - this won't happen now.

 169. http://sources.redhat.com/ml/libc-alpha/2003-01/msg00245.html

However, this turns out to not be that bad at all. The recursor can now be
restarted without having to restart the rest of the nameserver, for example.
Cooperation between the both halves of PDNS is also almost seamless. As a
result, 'non-lazy recursion' has been dropped. See Chapter 11 for more
details.

Furthermore, the recursor only works on Linux, Windows and Solaris (not
entirely). FreeBSD does not support the required functions. If you know any
important FreeBSD people, plea with them to support set/get/swapcontext!
Alternatively, FreeBSD coders could read the solution presented here [171]in
figure 5.

 171. http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~ejones/software/threading.html

The 'Contributor of the Month' award goes to Mark Bergsma who has responded
to our plea for help with the label compressor and contributed a wonderfully
simple and right fix that allows PDNS to compress just as well as Other
namerervers out there. An honorary mention goes to Ueli Heuer who, despite
having no C++ experience, submitted an excellent SRV record implementation.

Excellent work was also performed by Michel Stol, the Windows guy, in fixing
all our non-portable stuff again. Christof Meerwald has also done wonderful
work in porting MTasker to Windows, which was then used by Michel to get the
recursor functioning on Windows.

Other changes:

     * dnspacket.cc was cleaned up by factoring out common operations
     * Heaps of work on the recursing nameserver. Has now achieved weeks
       of uptime!
     * Recursor renamed from syncres to pdns_recursor
     * PowerDNS can now serve records it does not know about. To benefit
       from this slightly undocumented feature, add 1024 to the numerical
       type of a record and include the record in binary form in your
       database. Used internally by the recursing nameserver but you can
       use it too.
     * PowerDNS now knows about SIG and KEY records *names*. It does not
       support them yet but can at least report so now.
     * HINFO records can now be transferred from a master to PowerDNS
       (thanks to Ueli Heuer for noticing it didn't work).
     * Yet more UltraSPARC alignment issues fixed (Chris Andrews).
     * Dropped non-lazy recursion, nobody was using it. Lazy recursion
       became even more lazy after Dan Bernstein pointed out that
       additional processing is not vital, so PowerDNS does its best to
       do additional processing on recursive queries, but does not scream
       murder if it does not succeed. Due to caching, the next identical
       query will be successfully additionally processed.
     * Label compression was improved so we can now fit all . records in
       436 bytes, this used to be 460! (Code & formal proof of
       correctness by Mark Bergsma).
     * SRV support (incoming and outgoing), submitted by Ueli Heuer.
     * Generic backends do not support SOA serial autocalculation, it
       appears. Could lead to random SOA serials in case of a serial of 0
       in the database. Fixed so that 0 stays zero in that case. Don't
       set the SOA serial to 0 when using Generic MySQL or Generic
       PostgreSQL!
     * J root-server address was updated to its new location.
     * SIGUSR1 now forces the recursor to print out statistics to the
       log.
     * Meaning of recursor logging was changed a bit - a cache hit is now
       a question that was answered with 0 outgoing packets needed. Used
       to be a weighted average of internal cache hits.
     * MySQL compilation did not include -lz which causes problems on
       some platforms. Thanks to James H. Cloos Jr for reporting this.
     * After a suggestion by Daniel Meyer and Florus Both, the built in
       webserver now reports the configuration name when multiple
       PowerDNS instances are active.
     * Brad Knowles noticed that zone2sql had problems with the
       root.zone, fixed. This also closes some other zone2sql annoyances
       with converting single zones.

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