PowerDNS

General

The PowerDNS Authoritative Server is a versatile nameserver which supports a large number of backends. These backends can either be plain zone files or be more dynamic in nature. A backend is a datastore that the server will consult that contains DNS records (and some metadata). The backends range from database backends (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and BIND zone files to co-processes and JSON API’s.

Multiple backends can be enabled in the configuration by using the launch option. Each backend can be configured separately. In this howto we will focus on sqlite

For a full list of features see the PowerDNS documentation website

Install

apk add pdns pdns-backend-sqlite3 pdns-docs

rc-update add pdns

Configure

On Alpine, the default configuration file is: /etc/pdns/pdns.conf The default config is good to start using the DNS functions. To use the SQLite backend edit the config file and at the bottom add

launch=gsqlite3
gsqlite3-database=/var/lib/powerdns/pdns.sqlite3

The pdns-doc ships with example's for different backends in /usr/share/doc/pdns/. For this example we use the sqlite schema.

First we need to create the correct directory:

mkdir /var/lib/powerdns

Next we need to import the database scheme:

sqlite3 /var/lib/powerdns/pdns.sqlite3 < /usr/share/doc/pdns/schema.sqlite3.sql

Then we need to set the correct permissions:

chown -R pdns:pdns /var/lib/powerdns

For a more detailed guide please see the documentation here

Now we can start the server and start adding records to it:

rc-service pdns start

Use

Adding records is usually done through the commandline. There are several web based GUI's available, but this is outside the scope of this article. See the resources section for more information.

We first have to setup a dns zone:

pdnsutil create-zone example.com ns1.example.com

We also add one NS record. To add a new record we execute the following command:

pdnsutil add-record example.com. www A 192.0.2.1

where www is the subdomain, and 192.0.2.1 is the server we point it to.

Controlling PowerDNS status

Stop, start and restart the daemon in the usual fashion:

rc-service pdns start

rc-service pdns stop

rc-service pdns restart

Auto-start pdns at boot

To add the daemon to the default runlevel so it auto-starts at boot, do:

rc-update add pdns

Troubleshooting

TODO

• Ensure the daemon is running with

  rc-status

Resources

• The main website for PowerDNS: https://www.powerdns.com
• PowerDNS Documentation: https://doc.powerdns.com/(Most of this article is from the main documentation site. only Alpine specific details where changed.)
• Packagelist: https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=pdns*&branch=v3.17&repo=community&arch=&maintainer=

Web GUI:

• https://github.com/PowerDNS-Admin/PowerDNS-Admin
• https://pdnsmanager.org/
• https://www.poweradmin.org/