Deadwood 2.9.01 released: Recursion is ready for beta testing

[Sam Trenholme]

I have just released Deadwood 2.9.01.  This is the first release of
Deadwood with full recursion; in other words, in addition to getting
information from upstream_servers, Deadwood can now use root_servers
(if neither upstream_servers nor root_servers are set, Deadwood
defaults to the ICANN IPv4 root servers).

The release is available here, both as source code and as Windows binaries:

http://maradns.org/deadwood/testing/

This releases fixes a lot of issues people have reported here on the
list and elsewhere: Deadwood has full IPv6 support.  This release
handles CNAMEs correctly and doesn’t have the issues MaraDNS 1.x has
with AAAA records that point to CNAMEs.  There is a good chance that a
domain that doesn’t resolve with MaraDNS 1.x will resolve with
Deadwood.

More importantly, I’m willing to listen to bug reports about names not
resolving again.  If a given name doesn’t resolve in Deadwood 2.9, but
resolves using another DNS server, I want to know about it.  I now can
give people something better than “read
http://maradns.org/faq.html#resolve and no I won’t fix it” when people
report bugs with MaraDNS’ recursive resolver.  For example, when Ms.
Maxine Ritter reported a bug with recursive ANY queries, I told her I
wouldn’t fix that.  Well, that’s changed and I have fixed her issue;
Deadwood 2.9 correctly handles ANY queries.

It has been a long road to get here. I have wanted to rewrite MaraDNS’
recursive resolver since 2002; I started writing Deadwood in 2007 and
it’s finally feature-complete.

I encourage people to test Deadwood 2.9.01 and report any bugs they
find.  Please keep the following in mind:

    * Valgrind-reported memory leaks can always be reported.
Valgrind-reported errors are only valid if Deadwood is compiled with
-DVALGRIND_NOERRORS

    * The only officially supported OSes are Windows XP and CentOS 5.
OS-specific issues such as startup, daemonizing, sysloggin, and
/etc/resolv.conf setup are only supported on these two OSes.

    * Bugs need to be reported to the MaraDNS list, not to my email
account nor as blog comments. I hope to have time to set up a web
forum for MaraDNS/Deadwood support for people not comfortable with
mailing lists, but no promises.

- Sam

Note: I do not answer MaraDNS (including Deadwood) support requests
sent by private email without being compensated for my time. A MaraDNS
support request is any and all discussion you may wish to have about
MaraDNS in private email; if you want to email me to talk about
MaraDNS then, yes, that is a support request. I will discuss rates if
you want this kind of support. Thank you for your understanding.

MaraDNS security vulnerability reports, however, will be dealt with
without charge and kept confidential. If you don't know what Bugtraq
is, then, no, your email is not a security report. It is not a
security report unless you've done due diligence to determine how the
security bug you think you found can reasonably be exploited.