Bind 9 vs DJBDNS

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zaeemarshad
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Bind 9 vs DJBDNS

Post by zaeemarshad »

Hi all,

I need your opinion regarding performance and stability of DJBDNS as compared to BIND 9. I am planning to give djbdns a chance to prove itself on a pretty good hardware configuration (3.2 GHz Xeon, 2 GB DDR RAM, 2 x 72.3 SCSI). Its an HP ML 450 to be specific and will run CentOS 4.2. your feedback will be highly appreciated.

Regards

~zaeem
lambda
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Re: Bind 9 vs DJBDNS

Post by lambda »

djbdns is stable -- i've never had any trouble with it.

if you're going to use it for caching, give the cache lots of memory, and use this to tune it. if you're going to use it to serve domain information, make sure you write up lots of notes so the next sysadmin who comes along to replace you knows how to deal with it.
zaeemarshad
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Post by zaeemarshad »

This doesn't help. Totally against djbdns and points are solid. What's your opinion?

Cheers
zaeem
lambda
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Post by lambda »

oh yeah? well, try this!
zaeemarshad
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Post by zaeemarshad »

That is great. Any tool which can reliably stress test both Bind and DJB DNS? I have a HP ML 450 with 2 GB RAM and I want the maximum use of it. A stress tool that can test both authoritative and cache query performance on both these servers?

As a side note, I am not completely satisfied with the way BIND 9 uses available resources and that is the main reason for trying other solutions.

~Zaeem
lambda
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Post by lambda »

i searched, but didn't find anything useful. djbdns ships with dnsfilter, which tests dnscache primarily. i suppose if the ip addresses you check with dnsfilter are in a zone managed by your tinydns, you can test both services with it.

one thing i can recommend is cutting down on the lines logged by dnscache. read the docs for multilog, and change /service/dnscache/log/run so that it doesn't log lines beginning with "rr", "cached", or "tx".

but really, with the machine you have, you'll probably saturate your uplink long before djbdns starts slowing down.
fawad
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Post by fawad »

While we are on the subject of DNS servers, what are your guys' thoughts on MaraDNS? Sure, it's not as popular as either BIND or djbdns, it has some nice features (IMHO) like a very clean configuration syntax, machine parsable/generatable zone file format (like djbdns), etc.
lambda
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Post by lambda »

i've never used maradns, so i don't know how it compares with other servers. its license probably makes it easier than djbdns to redistribute.
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