Impressed with PowerDNS
I’ve spent the last couple weeks working with PowerDNS. We’re migrating our old BIND servers over to new PowerDNS servers that use a MySQL backend. Installation was fairly easy, because things were well documented. The application has worked perfectly, and when I emailed their mailing list to ask about a configuration setting that wasn’t documented, I got a useful reply within minutes.
Since PowerDNS is just the DNS Server, it doesn’t provide any user-interfaces for modifying the DNS information. I took a look at several of the possible applications that claimed to be “front ends” for PowerDNS, but didn’t find any that suited our needs. (I tried out WebDNS, Tupa, and a couple others listed on SourceForge). The existing tools were too complex, too simple, or too buggy. But, the database schema that PowerDNS uses, is pretty straightforward, so I wrote a PHP class that provides most of the necessary functions, and started our long-awaited customer interface that uses the class to allow our customers to maintain their own DNS records.
Overall, this has been a great project with great results.