Update #1: op-nslookup

turned on flat screen monitor
Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash

This is an update on Journey to new DNS servers, which I am now calling op-nslookup

I was playing around with PowerDNS on one of my existing servers, using a separate port, then ran simple dig queries and wanted to see what the difference would be. TL;DR: I wasn’t impressed.

What did I try:

  • I installed PowerDNS 4.6 server from their official repo, on an Ubuntu 18.04 server (yeah, I know).
  • Modified the pdns.conf file and set the existing named.conf file for the bind backend, so it loads the existing zones
  • Run zone2sql into an sqlite3 file, and configure gsqlite3 backend

In both cases (bind or gsqlite3 as backends) the performance was the same, I managed to tune the performance so the average of the query time was on par with the existing bind.

The bad part here was that while the minimum was the same (120-124ms) the maximum was way higher for PowerDNS (400ms 600ms while Bind was usually up to 300ms) so I think my numbers are not very scientific and if I want to be sure I’ll need to benchmark using a reliable tool and not simply run and copy-paste into calc…

But this isn’t all and I will definitely need to invest more time in comparing features, since I am sure there are configurations at which I can get more out of it, even in speed wise.

The fact this is a hobby project does not mean I need to lower my standards.