External authentication for PowerDNS built-in web interface
I’ve been working with PowerDNS recently to replace our old Bind servers. One small issue I’ve had with the program, though, is that it’s built-in Web interface that displays statistics about the running server only works with a username and password. I didn’t particularly like this setup, because it means that everybody that needs access to it has the same password.
So, I configured the PowerDNS web server to only listen on the localhost, and the created an Apache instance on the server to perform the authentication, and then do a proxy lookup on the PowerDNS Web Interface.
PowerDNS Configuration from /etc/powerdns/pdns.conf
## Start the webserver for statistical information
webserver=yes
webserver-address=127.0.0.1
webserver-password=
webserver-port=9099
Apache Configuration
I just put this file in /etc/httpd/conf.d/pdns.conf You can use any type of authentication here that Apache supports, just like you would use in a .htaccess file
<Location /pdns/>
AuthType Basic
AuthName “Admin”
AuthUserFile /var/www/html/.htpasswd
Require valid-user
</Location>
ProxyPass /pdns http://127.0.0.1:9099/
ProxyPassReverse /pdns http://127.0.0.1:9099/