Installation of PowerDNS on Linux Mint Latest

PowerDNS is an open-source domain name server software coded in C++. It supports different backends for data storage and allows zone transfers in various formats. It provides a modern, high-performance DNS server solution.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to install PowerDNS on Linux Mint Latest.

Prerequisites

Make sure you have administrator privileges on your Linux Mint system. Also, ensure that you have access to the Internet and have a terminal with a bash shell.

Step 1 - Update the System

Before we proceed with the installation of PowerDNS, it is essential to update the system to the latest packages. It can be achieved by issuing the following commands on your terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2 - Install PowerDNS

To install PowerDNS on Linux Mint, we need to add the PowerDNS repository. It can be done by the following commands:

wget -q https://repo.powerdns.com/FD380FBB-pub.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://repo.powerdns.com/ubuntu focal-auth-44 main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pdns.list
sudo apt update

After successfully adding the repository, we can start installing PowerDNS by using the following command:

sudo apt install pdns-server

Once the installation completes, we can check the status of the PowerDNS service by using the following command:

sudo systemctl status pdns.service

It should return an output like below, indicating that the service is up and running:

pdns-server.service - PowerDNS Authoritative Server
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/pdns-server.service; enabled; vendor pre>
Active: active (running) since Fri 2021-10-15 20:06:52 IST; 39s ago
  Docs: man:pdns_server(1)
Main PID: 32512 (pdns_server)
Tasks: 10 (limit: 9368)
Memory: 5.5M
CGroup: /system.slice/pdns-server.service
        └─32512 /usr/sbin/pdns_server --guardian=no --daemon=no --disable-repu>

Great! We have successfully installed PowerDNS on our Linux Mint.

Step 3 - Configuring PowerDNS

PowerDNS uses a configuration file located at /etc/powerdns/pdns.conf by default. We can modify the configuration file based on our requirements.

The following configurations are suggested for basic operation:

# Disable webserver
webserver=no

# Enable DNSSEC
dnssec=no

# Enable Security Poll
security-poll-suffix=

# Set UDP and TCP port used by PowerDNS
local-port=53

To apply the changes, we need to restart the PowerDNS service by the following command:

sudo systemctl restart pdns.service

Step 4 - Testing PowerDNS

To test our PowerDNS installation, we can use the following command:

dig @localhost version.bind chaos txt +short

It should return an output like below:

"powerdns-auth-4.3.1"

Note: If you get a “connection refused” error, check the firewall or network setup.

Yay! We have successfully installed, configured, and tested PowerDNS on our Linux Mint Latest.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have learned how to install PowerDNS on Linux Mint Latest. We have also learned how to configure and test our PowerDNS installation. PowerDNS offers various features, including flexible backend integration and DNSSEC support. It is a reliable and robust DNS server solution.

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