New Package: rbldnsd

[Michael Fleming]

On Thu, 23 Jun 2005 17:06:49 +0100. Paul Howarth waffled thusly:

> rbldnsd is a small and fast DNS daemon which is especially made to serve 
> DNSBL zones. This daemon was inspired by Dan J. Bernstein's rbldns 
> program found in the djbdns package.
> 
> rbldnsd is extremely fast - it outperforms both bind and djbdns greatly. 
> It has very small memory footprint.

<snip>

> Package submission for review (src & i386, RPMs, spec, initscript):
> http://www.city-fan.org/~paul/extras/rbldnsd/
> 
> Paul.

I've grabbed the SRPM and had a look...

Good:
- Builds in mock (viva minimal dependencies!)
- Clean, correct and readable spec file :-)
- License OK
- Runs fine.
- Uninstalls cleanly.

Could do with a second look:
- Defaults to "on" at runlevels 3 / 4 / 5.

This could make hosts with BIND / djbdns / my-fave-dnssserver-package
unhappy if they too want to start automagically and bind 53/* on all
interfaces. 

Given that the package also has no zones, even dummy ones, I'd disable it
on all runlevels ("-" instead of "345" in the chkconfig line in
rbldnsd.init) and make the admin configure it before switching it on.

- Change references "/var/lib/rbldns/" to "/var/lib/rbldnsd/" in /etc/
  sysconfig/rbldnsd
 
Keeps consistency with the directory structure used in the rest of the
package. As admins will need to change this file anyway they _should_ pick
it up, but it's safer to keep that consistency and lessen the chance of a
casual admin botching things, wondering WTF happened and filing a wasteful
bug report :-).

- Where possible pass "-q" to the rbldnsd process on init.

This will cut down the initial console noise when it starts and allow the
boot to continue while the process does it's thing in the background.

This would be especially helpful for large zones. This is again probably
something to toss into the sysconfig file entry AFAICS. Any problems will
log to syslog anyway in cases where it goes pear-shaped.

The above are the only showstoppers / issues I can see. If you can correct
these I'll cheerfully approve it - I'd like to see something like this
added, it's a very cool tool.

(As an aside, djbdns users who've previously configured that package's
rbldns aren't going to like the chosen user (same username as that
suggested in the DJB docs) but then again if they're capable of jumping
through the hoops of installing djbware they can work around this one :-P) 

Michael.
(Also a djbdns user ;-P)

-- 
Michael Fleming <mfleming at enlartenment.com>
"Bother" said the Borg, "We've assimilated Pooh!"