PowerDNS Recursor is an open source, high-end, free, portable and high-performance resolving name server, a command-line software that provides system administrators with a feature-rich and comprehensive set of technologies related to email and Internet Naming. It is part of the well known PowerDNS software suite.
PowerDNS is open source daemon name server software written from scratch that providing a high-performance, modern and advanced authoritative-only nameserver. It interfaces with almost any database, and conforms with all the relevant DNS (Domain Name System) standards documents.
Features at a glance
Key features include complete support for all popular standards, DNS64 support, the ability to reconfigure it without downtime, support for security measures and block lists, remote and local access, powerful anti-spoofing measures, answer reconditioning, question interception, NXDOMAIN redirection, plain BIND zone files, direct control API and built-in scripted answer generation based on Lua.
In addition, it includes top-notch features that are common to all PowerDNS products, including support for IPv4 (UDP and TCP), IPv6 (UDP and TCP), high performance, read-only SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) statistics bridge, as well as real-time graphing through remotely pollable statistics.
PowerDNS Recursor is a very powerful software that can handle hundreds of million of DNS resolutions, backed by multiple processors and the same state-of-the-art scripting functionality that is used on the PowerDNS Authoritative Server product. It is a very flexible and performant DNS resolution program written especially for GNU/Linux systems.
Under the hood and availability
PowerDNS is available on all major Linux distributions and uses a flexible backend architecture, specifically designed to enable access to DNS information from any data source. The software is written entirely in the C++ programming language and it’s available for download as native installers for Ubuntu/Debian and Red Hat/Fedora operating systems, as well as a source archive. It has been successfully tested on both 32-bit and 64-bit hardware platforms.
