history.html

---
menu_name: history
layout: default
---

<p>This project was originally conceived circa early 2007.  I had just begun a new job at Logitech.  We needed some geographic DNS redirection features for the project I was working on and when I surveyed the landscape at the time I didn't find any acceptable options.  The available open source options (e.g. a trivial BIND patch) were insufficient on features, and the commercial options (e.g. F5's hardware solution) were prohibitively expensive for the scale of the project in question.</p>
<p>The first internal drafts of this daemon were written in pure Perl using the POE framework and Net::DNS for packet-mangling.  It didn't even support full authoritative service, you simply delegated a hostname off to this server (e.g. "www") and it could do geographic redirection of A-records for that one hostname.  It worked reasonably well and was even deployed to production successfully in this form.</p>
<p>However, two key issues were apparent.  First, the performance and reliability wasn't great, and DNS really needs to be performant and reliable.  Packet captures were showing a small percentage of totally dropped requests, and another small percentage of very slow (e.g. ~200ms+) responses before even accounting for actual network delays.  I did some extensive debugging on these issues, but ultimately I was unable to resolve them completely and had to chalk it up to "Hey this software is running on top of a huge complex stack of ever-changing and often slightly-buggy CPAN modules in a dynamic scripting language."</p>
<p>The other issue was that operating via delegation didn't allow for geographic redirection of the domain's root name, and of course I couldn't move the whole domain to the special server because it didn't support all of the other basic features of a normal authoritative DNS server.</p>
<p>To resolve these issues, I re-wrote the core code in C and added all the basic features for a full authoritative server.  I left the config-file parsing in Perl, which generated a binary blob the C code consumed for runtime (containing binary structs for all of the config and zonefile data).  Once that was working reasonably well and deployed to production at Logitech, I talked it over with my boss at the time (hi Dean!) and open-sourced the code.  This lead to the first public release of the code (0.02) in mid-2008.</p>
<p>Late in 2009, I started working on a major refactor.  The primary goals here were to move the configuration parsing into the C code like a normal daemon, add a ton of new testsuite coverage (100% branch coverage of the core packet parse/generate code was the goal, which was achieved), and to move the geographic redirection code out to a DSO-based plugin so that other techniques could be experimented on without touching the relatively stable core DNS code.  This effort finally lead to a new stable release series (1.0.x) in April of 2010.</p>
<p>The rest is all relatively well-documented in the NEWS file.</p>