this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
18 points (90.9% liked)

Selfhosted

40731 readers
497 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hello --

I have my DNS with a cloud provider that I want to stop using, and was considering where to move it (a few domains with a handful entries each). At some point I was wondering if I should run it myself. I have two VPS' in different data centers with fixed IP addresses, and I read up a bit - seems like this is doable. I am not set on what software to use. I would like it to run in a container. Does anybody have any recommendations, positive or negative?

Thanks :)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] RegalPotoo@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's super achievable - I've run my own DNS for ages, there are a few common pitfalls but overall it's pretty low maintenance.

  • Personally I use PowerDNS, but you could also use something like BIND. I find PDNS to be a little easier to configure
  • Make sure you are looking at the docs for PowerDNS Authoritative, not PowerDNS recursor
  • You install PDNS Authoritative on bother servers, then designate one as a primary (/master) and the other as a secondary (/slave/replica). You create records on the primary, and configure it to replicate the records to the secondary using AXFR
  • I'd recommend using one of the database backends for PDNS - personally I use Postgresql. Sqlite is simpler to set up, but I've had issues where making multiple updates over the API causes errors due to locking
  • DNSSEC is a bit fiddly to set up initially, but doesn't add much operational overhead once it's running
  • Take a looks at glue records if your want to host the domain that the nameservers themselves use
  • Once you've got things running, consider something like https://ns-global.zone as a backup

Feel free to ping me if you have questions or need help getting things set up

[–] lidstah@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

Kudos for mentionning powerDNS, it's an amazing software :)

One thing I love with powerDNS is the various backends available, notably the postgreSQL and mariaDB/mysql ones. Only the primary powerdns instance modifies the database records, the secondary instances just read from database (master or replicas). Thus, no real need for AXFR: as soon as you added/modified a record on the primary, the secondary pdns servers will see it in the database.

The pdnsutil CLI tool is also really convenient, and the powerDNS API is a godsend when you need to automatise stuff for thousands of domains and hundred of thousands of records. There's also a nice third-party webUI (powerdns-admin, docker image: pdnsadmin/pda-legacy). Bonus, Terraform does have a powerdns provider.

At work we use dnsdist (from powerDNS too) to load-balance between our powerdns instances (with caching!), and to filter out/rate-limit/temporary ban bad actors (dns laundering, records enumeration and such for example).