[Nottingham] MySQL backed nameserver

[Tom Bird]

Graeme Fowler wrote:
> On 02/11/2006 17:47, Tom Bird wrote:
>> SQL backing DNS is retarded, use dynamic zones.
> 
> Well hello, Mr Opinionated! Once again Tom lands with a fair and 
> even-handed appraisal of the various technical approaches being 
> discussed and suggests another one in useful amounts of detail.
> 
> </sarcasm>
> 
> SQL backing DNS is an appropriate solution for many situations, old 
> chap, especially in very large systems where the startup time is 
> critical. For me, an SQL-backended DNS server with the ability to handle 
>  DDNS updates with TSIG keys would be perfect, only such a system 
> doesn't (currently) exist.

Well, the idea behind bind-dlz is a good one, and should be introduced 
into the main BIND release IMO, however I do feel that backing it with 
SQL databases is just pure folly.  I recently was the happy recipient of 
a DNS attack of some kind, I still am not sure exactly why it happened 
but I was seeing upwards of 10Mbit/s of DNS traffic at times on my two 
hosted resolvers, thousands of queries a second (imagine the size of a 
query packet and you get some idea).  BIND running as it does served the 
queries and shrugged it off with a few percent of CPU used.

Now imagine each query hits a full fat database rather than the quick 
and cheap DB, optimised for serving DNS internal to BIND.  Plop, there 
go my services.

> I could've sworn I already mentioned dynamic DNS, anyway.

Probably did.  I mentioned it again :)

-- 
Tom

// we only came to kick some ass