NSD 4.0 Beta: NSD4 sees the light..

Team NLnet Labs -

By Wouter Wijngaards

We are proud to announce a beta version of NSD4.0.

With this beta release NSD4.0 is feature complete. Earlier we described our high-level plans with NSD4; below we describe the features that are available in NSD4.0 and some of what we have on the TODO list for 4.1 and 4.2; while in another post the differences in configuration and migration methodology is described.

NSD 4.0 highlights

Stable: DNS Protocol Logic

The implementation of the DNS protocol logic itself has not been touched: You may expect the same query-answer behavior as with NSD3.

Internals: Radix Tree

We have modified the internal data structure to use a radix tree. We have not done (nor are we aware of) serious benchmarks, but early reports of operators that have been doing rudimentary tests indicate that the performance of NSD4 has significantly (2 digits percentage) improved over NSD3.

Response Rate Limiting (RRL)

Inspired and based on the work by Vixie and Schryver we have implemented DNS Response Rate Limiting. The NSD RRL implementation includes most of the features as described in the Vixie and Schryver paper. The implementation is done independently from scratch (following the biological diversity requirement that is at the basis of NSD) and in some details we have made different choices in order to fit to the NSD internal architecture. More details here.

Support to operate in ‘Many Zones’ environments

We have introduced a number of changes that allows better integration of environments that want to use NSD in situations where many zones are served. This is achieved through the integration of the zone compiler as an NSD process, by adding patterns that allow the specification of common configuration options among zones, such as the location of a primary server. Using the nsd-control program, zones can be added and tied to these patterns during run-time. There is no need to stop the server, recompile, and reload in order to add new zones.

In addition, we have improved the performance of the XFR transfer code by two orders of magnitude, making the operation of NSD4 in a highly dynamic environment more effective.

We believe that this makes NSD4 suitable as a secondary server for hosting and similar environments.

NSD 4.x

We continue to work on NSD4.1 and NSD4.2.

For these versions we plan to:

  • Review logging and statistics.
  • Review incremental updates.
  • Review the specifics of the response rate limiting implementation. On this issue we are looking for community feedback, mostly through the rate limits mailing list that was specifically created for discussing DNS rate limiting.

Beta

We would like to stress that this is a beta release and we are still going through final documentation and tests. That said, we welcome reports from folk that are running their code in their test or production environments. If you want to participate in beta tests, at your own risk of course, the latest version of the code is available from

https://nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/nsd/nsd-4.0.0b1.tar.gz
sha1 ad899c3795ca5311a1fea0d38f61026338a5ff60.

There is a new beta2 version: 

https://nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/nsd/nsd-4.0.0b2.tar.gz
sha1 e093d1519bf2e3f3c458ccf41aec45dce6a84a84
sha256 966bd0a7cdc29654df6579904d6833abfcd913428d68801f49853db7867e86a5