1. I'm using an older version of MaraDNS3. What license is MaraDNS released under?
4. How do I report bugs in MaraDNS?
5. Some of the postings to the mailing list do not talk about MaraDNS!
6. How do I get off the mailing list?
7. How do I set up reverse DNS on MaraDNS?
8. I am on a slow network, and MaraDNS can not process recursive queries
9. When I try to run MaraDNS, I get a cryptic error message.
10. After I start MaraDNS, I can not see the process when I run netstat -na
11. What string library does MaraDNS use?
12. Why does MaraDNS use a multi-threaded model?
13. I feel that XXX feature should be added to MaraDNS
14. I feel that MaraDNS should use another documentation format
15. Is there any process I need to follow to add a patch to MaraDNS?
16. Can MaraDNS act as a primary nameserver?
17. Can MaraDNS act as a secondary nameserver?
18. What is the difference between an authoritative and a recursive DNS server?
19. The getzone client isn't allowing me to add certain hostnames to my zone
21. Can I use MaraDNS in Windows?
22. MaraDNS freezes up after being used for a while
23. What kind of Python integration does MaraDNS have
24. Doesn't "kvar" mean "four" in Esperanto?
26. I am having problems setting upstream_servers
27. Why doesn't the MaraDNS.org web page validate?
29. Does MaraDNS have support for SPF?
30. I'm having problems resolving CNAMES I have set up.
31. I have a NS delegation, and MaraDNS is doing strange things.
33. Where is the root.hints file?
34. Are there any plans to use autoconf to build MaraDNS?
35. How do I change the compiler or compile-time flags with MaraDNS' build process?
36. Will you make a package for the particular Linux distribution I am using?
37. I am using the native Windows port of MaraDNS, and some features are not working.
39. You make a lot of releases of MaraDNS; at our ISP/IT department, updating software is non-trivial.
40. I have star records in my zones, and am having problems with NXDOMAINs/IPV6 resolution
41. I have a zone with only SOA/NS records, and the zone is not working.
42. I am having problems registering my domain with AFNIC (the registrar for .fr domains)
43. I can't see the full answers for subdomains I have delegated
44. MaraDNS 1 has a problem resolving a domain
45. MaraDNS 1.2 has issues with NXDOMAINS and case sensitivity.
46. Can MaraDNS offer protection from phishing and malicious sites?
MaraDNS 1.0 and 1.2 are only supported for critical security updates, and will no longer be supported on December 21, 2010. MaraDNS 1.3 is also only supported for critical security updates, and support will stop on December 21, 2012. MaraDNS 1.4 will be fully supported (security and other important bug fixes) for the foreseeable future, alongside MaraDNS 2.0 when and if it comes out.
Read the quick start guide, which is the file named 0QuickStart in the MaraDNS distribution.
Copyright (c) 2002-2009 Sam Trenholme and othersTERMS
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
This software is provided 'as is' with no guarantees of correctness or fitness for purpose.
4.3.2.10.in-addr.arpa. PTR www.example.com.
It is also possible to use a special "FQDN4" which automatically sets up the reverse mapping of a given record:
www.example.com. FQDN4 10.2.3.4If you wish to have a PTR (reverse DNS lookup; getting a DNS name from a numeric IP) record work on the internet at large, it is not a simple matter of just adding a record like this to a MaraDNS zonefile. One also needs control of the appropriate in-addr.arpa. domain.
While it can make logical sense to contact the IP 10.11.12.13 when trying to get the reverse DNS lookup (fully qualified domain name) for a given IP, DNS servers don't do this. DNS server, instead, contact the root DNS servers for a given in-addr.arpa name to get the reverse DNS lookup, just like they do with any other record type.
When an internet service provider is given a block of IPs, they are also given control of the DNS zones which allow them to control reverse DNS lookups for those IPs. While it is possible to obtain a domain and run a DNS server without the knowledge or intervention of an ISP, being able to control reverse DNS lookups for those IPs requires ISP intervention.
Note that making this too high will slow MaraDNS down when DNS servers are down, which is, alas, all too common on today's internet.timeout_seconds = 5
If MaraDNS does return a cryptic error message without letting you know what is wrong, let us know on the mailing list so that we can fix the bug. MaraDNS is designed to be easy to use; cryptic error messages go against this spirit.
When MaraDNS is up, the relevant line in the netstat output looks like this: udp 0 0 127.0.0.1:53 0.0.0.0:*
While on the topic of netstat, if you run netstat -nap as root on Linux and some other *nix operating systems, you can see the names of the processes which are providing internet services.
MaraDNS uses its own string library, which is called the "js_string" library. Man pages for most of the functions in the js_string library are in the folder doc/man of the MaraDNS distribution
The multi-threaded model is, plain and simple, the simplest way to write a functioning recursive DNS server. There is a reason why MaraDNS, pdnsd, and BIND 9 all use the multi-threaded model.
MaraDNS 2.0, when and if it is released, will not use threads.
The only thing that will convince me to implement a given feature for MaraDNS is cold, hard cash. If you want me to keep a given feature proprietary, you better have lots of cold hard cash.
Keep in mind that both the BIND and NSD name servers were developed by having the programmers paid to work on the programs. PowerDNS was originally commercial software with the author only reluctantly made GPL after seeing that the market for a commercial DNS server is very small. All of the other DNS servers which have been developed as hobbyist projects (Posadis, Pdnsd, and djbdns) are no longer being actively worked on by the primary developer.
The reason that MaraDNS uses its own documentation format is to satisfy both the needs of translators to have a unified document format and my own need to use a documentation format that is simple enough to be readily understood and which I can add features on an as needed basis.
The documentation format is essentially simplified HTML with some special tags added to meet MaraDNS' special needs.
This gives me more flexibility to adapt the documentation format to changing needs. For example, when someone pointed out that it's not a good idea to have man pages with hi-bit characters, it was a simple matter to add a new HIBIT tag which allows man pages to be without hi-bit characters, and other document formats to retain hi-bit characters.
Having a given program have its own documentation format is not without precedent; Perl uses its own "pod" documentation format.
Yes.
Here is the procedure for making a proper patch:
Yes.
The zoneserver program serves zones so that other DNS servers can be secondaries for zones which MaraDNS serves. This is a separate program from the maradns server, which processes both authoritative and recursive UDP DNS queries.
See the DNS master document in the MaraDNS tutorial for details.
Yes.
Please read the DNS slave document, which is part of the MaraDNS tutorial.
An authoritative DNS server is a DNS server that a recursive server contacts in order to find out the answer to a given DNS query.
1.1.1.10.in-addr.arpa. PTR dns.example.com.
MaraDNS will not add the record, since the record is out-of-bailiwick. In other words, it is a host name that does not end in .example.com.
There are two workarounds for this issue:
MaraDNS is developed on a CentOS 5 and Windows XP dual boot laptop. MaraDNS may or may not compile and run on other systems.
Yes. There is both a partial mingw32 (native win32 binary) port and a full Cygwin port of MaraDNS; both of these ports are part of the native build of MaraDNS. Deadwood has full Windows support, including the ability to run as a service.
If using your ISP's name servers or some other name servers which are not, in fact, root name servers, please make sure that you are using the upstream_servers dictionary variable instead of the root_servers dictionary variable.
If you still see MaraDNS freeze up after making this correction, please send a bug report to the mailing list.
There is currently no other integration with Python.
The "big-O" or "theta" growth rates for various MaraDNS functions are as follows, where N is the number of authoritative host names being served:
Startup time N Memory usage N Processing incoming DNS requests 1
As can be seen, MaraDNS will process 1 or 100000 domains in the same amount of time, once the domain names are loaded in to memory.
upstream_servers["."] = "10.3.28.79, 10.2.19.83"Note the ["."]. The reason for this is so future versions of MaraDNS may have more fine-grained control over the upstream_servers and root_servers values.
Note that the upstream_servers variable needs to be initialized before being used via upstream_servers = {} (the reason for this is so that a mararc file has 100% Python-compatible syntax). A complete mararc file that uses upstream_servers may look like this:
ipv4_bind_addresses = "127.0.0.1"
chroot_dir = "/etc/maradns"
recursive_acl = "127.0.0.1/8"
upstream_servers = {}
upstream_servers["."] = "10.1.2.3, 10.2.4.6"
I have designed MaraDNS' web page to be usable and as attractive as possible in any major browser released in the last ten years. Cross-browser support is more important than strict W3 validation. The reason why the CSS does not validate is because I need a way to make sure there is always a scrollbar on the web page, even if the content is not big enough to merit one; this is to avoid the content jumping from page to page. There is no standard CSS tag that lets me do this. I'm using a non-standard tag to enable this in Gecko (Firefox's rendering engine); this is enabled by default in Trident (Internet Explorer's rendering engine). The standards are deficient and blind adherence to them would result in an inferior web site.
There are also two validation warnings generated by redefinitions which are needed as part of the CSS filters used to make the site attractive on older browsers with limited CSS support.
On a related note, the reason why I use tables instead of CSS for some of the layout is because Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and other browsers do not have support for the max-width CSS property. Without this property, the web page will not scale down correctly without using tables. Additionally, tables allow a reasonably attractive header in browsers without CSS support.
SPF configuration is beyond the scope of MaraDNS' documentation. However, at the time of this FAQ entry being written (June, 2006), information and documentation concerning SPF is available at http://openspf.org. The BIND examples will work in MaraDNS csv2 zone files as long as the double quotes (") are replaced by single quotes ('). For example, a SPF TXT record that looks like example.net. IN TXT "v=spf1 +mx a:colo.example.com/28 -all" in a BIND zone file will look like example.net. TXT 'v=spf1 +mx a:colo.example.com/28 -all' in a MaraDNS zone file. MaraDNS version 1.2.08 and higher can also make the corresponding SPF record, which will have the syntax example.net. SPF 'v=spf1 +mx a:colo.example.com/28 -all'.
Let us suppose we have a CNAME record without an A record in the local DNS server's database, such as:
google.example.com. CNAME www.google.com.
This record, which is a CNAME record for "google.example.com", points to "www.google.com". Some DNS servers will recursively look up www.google.com, and render the above record like this:
google.example.com. CNAME www.google.com. www.google.com. CNAME 66.102.7.104
For security reasons, MaraDNS doesn't do this. Instead, MaraDNS will simply output:
google.example.com. CNAME www.google.com.Some stub resolvers will be unable to resolve google.example.com as a consequence.
If you set up MaraDNS to resolve CNAMEs thusly, you will get a warning in your logs about having a dangling CNAME record.
If you want to remove these warnings, add the following to your mararc file:
no_cname_warnings = 1
Information about how to get MaraDNS to resolve dangling CNAME records is in the tutorial file dangling.html
The thinking is this: A normal recursive DNS query is usually one where one wants to know the final DNS output. So, if MaraDNS delegates a given record to another DNS server, and gets a recursive request for said query, MaraDNS will recursively resolve the query for you.
For example, let us suppose we have a mararc file that looks like this:
chroot_dir = "/etc/maradns"
ipv4_bind_addresses = "10.1.2.3"
chroot_dir = "/etc/maradns"
recursive_acl = "127.0.0.1/8, 10.0.0.0/8"
csv2 = {}
csv2["example.com."] = "db.example.com"
And a db.example.com file that looks like this:
www.example.com. 10.1.2.3 joe.example.com. NS ns.joe.example.com. ns.joe.example.com. A 10.1.2.4Next, you are trying to find out why www.joe.example.com is not resolving. If you naively send a query to 10.1.2.3 for www.joe.example.com as askmara Awww.joe.example.com. 10.1.2.3 or as dig @10.1.2.3 www.joe.example.com. or as nslookup www.joe.example.com. 10.1.2.3, you will not get any information that will help you solve the problem, since 10.1.2.3 will try to contact 10.1.2.4 to resolve www.joe.example.com.
The solution is to run your DNS query client thusly:
askmara -n Awww.joe.example.com. 10.1.2.3
dig +norecurse @10.1.2.3 www.joe.example.com
nslookup -norec www.joe.example.com 10.1.2.3
As an aside, this particular problem will not happen if MaraDNS is run only as an authoritative nameserver.
If a zone looks like this:
example.net. +600 soa ns1.example.net. hostmaster@example.net 10 10800 3600 604800 1080 example.net. +600 mx 10 mail.example.net. example.net. +600 a 10.2.3.5 example.net. +600 ns ns1.example.net. example.net. +600 ns ns3.example.net. mail.example.net. +600 a 10.2.3.7 www.example.net. +600 a 10.2.3.11Then the NS records will be "synth-ip" records.
The zone should look like this:
example.net. +600 soa ns1.example.net. hostmaster@example.net 10 10800 3600 604800 1080 example.net. +600 ns ns1.example.net. example.net. +600 ns ns3.example.net. example.net. +600 mx 10 mail.example.net. example.net. +600 a 10.2.3.5 mail.example.net. +600 a 10.2.3.7 www.example.net. +600 a 10.2.3.11This will remove the "synth-ip" records.
To automate this process, this awk script is useful:
fetchzone whatever.zone.foo 10.1.2.3 | awk '
{if($3 ~ /ns/ || $3 ~ /soa/){print}
else{a = a "\n" $0}}
END{print a}' > zonefile.csv2
Replace "whatever.zone.foo" with the name of the zone you are
fetchin 10.1.2.3 with the IP address of the DNS master, and
zonefile.csv2 with the name of the zone file MaraDNS loads.
root_servers["."] = "131.161.247.232," root_servers["."] += "208.185.249.250," root_servers["."] += "66.227.42.140," root_servers["."] += "66.227.42.149," root_servers["."] += "65.243.92.254"Note that there is no "+=" in the first line, and the last line does not have a comma at the end. Read the recursive tutorial document for more information.
In more detail, MaraDNS does not use autoconf for the following reasons:
There is, however, a CentOS 5-compatible RPM spec file in the build directory.
MaraDNS 1.2 and 1.3.07, the older stable branches of MaraDNS, were last updated in August of 2008.
I go to a great deal of effort to make sure MaraDNS releases are as painless to update as possible. I ensure configuration file format compatibility, even between major versions of MaraDNS. With the exception of configuration file parser bugfixes, MaraDNS 1.0 configuration files are compatible with MaraDNS 1.4.
It is impossible to make code that is bug-free or without security problems. This is especially true with code that runs on the public internet.1 Code has to be updated from time to time. What I do in order to minimize the disruption caused by an update is to always have a stable bugfix-only branch of MaraDNS (right now I have two bugfix-only branches), and to, as much as possible, evenly space out the bugfix updates.
Footnote 1: Even DJB's code has security problems. Both Qmail and DjbDNS have known security problems, and need to be patched before put on a public internet server.
% SOA localhost. root@localhost. 1 7200 600 1209600 3600 % NS localhost.This zone will not work until some non-SOA/NS record is added, such as in this zone file:
% SOA localhost. root@localhost. 1 7200 600 1209600 3600 % NS localhost. foo.% TXT 'MaraDNS 1.2 needs this record.'This bug has been fixed in MaraDNS 1.3 and 1.4; since this is not a security bug (there is a perfectly good workaround), this bug will not be fixed in MaraDNS 1.2 unless you pay me to fix it.
Note also: AFNIC gives warnings about reverse DNS lookups; more information about this issue can be found in the FAQ entry about reverse DNS mappings (question 7). In addition, AFNIC requires DNS-over-TCP to work; information on configuring MaraDNS to have this can be found in the DNS-over-TCP tutorial.
Here's what happening: I'm rewriting the recursive resolver for MaraDNS. The old code was always designed to be a placeholder until I wrote a new recursive resolver.
The new recursive resolver is called "Deadwood"; right now it's a fully functional non-recursive DNS cache. More information is here:
http://maradns.blogspot.com/search/label/Deadwood
Since the old recursive code is a bit difficult to maintain, and since I in the process of rewriting the recursive code, my rule is that I will only resolve issues where an Alexa top 500 site can not resolve with MaraDNS' current recursive resolver at all.
If resolving a given domain with MaraDNS' code is an urgent issue for you, please consider sponsoring MaraDNS:
http://www.maradns.org/products.html
If this is an issue for your organization, please upgrade to a newer version of MaraDNS; MaraDNS 1.4 does not have this bug. If you want to see this bug fixed in MaraDNS 1.2, please help sponsor MaraDNS.
Here is a webpage that explains how its done:
http://www.malwaredomains.com/?p=288
Should that website be down, I have made a local mirror of the Perl script here:
MaraDNS supports both having stars at the beginning of records and the end of records. For example, to have anything.example.com. have the IP 10.1.2.3, add this line to the zone file for example.com:
*.example.com. A 10.1.2.3
To have stars at the end of records, csv2_default_zonefile has to be set. The mararc parameter bind_star_handling affects how star records are handled. More information is in the mararc man page.