                             Deadwood FAQ

What is Deadwood?

   Deadwood is the recursive DNS daemon (service) for the up and
   coming MaraDNS 2.0. MaraDNS 2.0 is going to have separate
   programs for authoritative records (maradns) and recursive
   records (Deadwood). Deadwood is a standalone recursive server
   that can either be used in conjunction with MaraDNS, or by
   itself. The program can run either in CentOS 5 (and hopefully
   other Linux and *NIX flavors) or in Windows XP (as well as newer
   Windows releases).

   The reason for this rewrite is because I have never been
   satisfied with the recursive resolver in MaraDNS 1.0. When I
   designed MaraDNS 1.0's recursive resolver, there were a number
   of things needed to get full recursion to work that I did not
   anticipate. By the time I shoehorned in all of the features
   needed in a fully recursive DNS server, the code was rather
   messy and difficult to maintain.

   Ever since 2002, my plan has been to rewrite MaraDNS' recursive
   code. In the fall of 2007, I finally started making the code;
   the code became feature complete in the summer of 2010.

How do I use Deadwood?

   Create a configuration file, /etc/dwood3rc, that looks like
   this:

 bind_address="127.0.0.1"
 recursive_acl="127.0.0.1/8"
 chroot_dir="/etc/deadwood"

   Now, create an empty directory owned by root called
   /etc/deadwood. Once this is done, compile Deadwood (as per
   INSTALL.txt), and see if it runs. The above configuration file
   will only allow connections using the loopback interface on the
   same machine to resolve domains with Deadwood.

How do I convert a MaraDNS mararc file in to a Deadwood dwood3rc file?

   While some effort has been made to have Deadwood use the same
   syntax and variables as MaraDNS, there are some differences to
   keep in mind:

     * Deadwood does not have a "ipv4_alias" parameter.
     * Deadwood handles "verbose_level" differently; to get fully
       verbose messages, "verbose_level" has to be 100 (as opposed
       to MaraDNS' 10)

