Deadwood

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Deadwood is MaraDNS 2.0’s recursive resolver. As part of MaraDNS, it is open-source, released under a BSD-style license. Its goal is to be tiny—it is the smallest cross-platform currently maintained DNS server. The binary can be 64k in size.

Deadwood is a complete from-the-ground rewrite of MaraDNS’ recursive DNS server, sharing no code with MaraDNS. The design is by and large the same (for example, the notes in the PDF document The Hitchhiker’s Guide to DNS cache poisoning about MaraDNS 1.3.07 also apply to Deadwood), except that Deadwood does not use threads.

The current stable version of Deadwood can be downloaded from the “Stable” directory. Some other resources, including documentation are also available.

Here is a listing of files here:

May-11-2013 browse-source
May-11-2013 doc
May-11-2013 historic
May-11-2013 patches
May-11-2013 snap
May-11-2013 stable
May-11-2013 TCC
May-11-2013 testing
May-11-2013 tiny

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IMPORTANT: Like MaraDNS, I do not support Deadwood via private email.

The "stable" directory has the most recent release of Deadwood.

The .tar.bz2 file is the CentOS 5 and Windows source code; the .zip file is the Windows 7 binary.

There is a supplied document (Vista.txt) that describes one way to get Deadwood to run in Vista and Windows 7.

The "tiny" directory has an older (but still maintained with security and other critical updates) version of Deadwood which has fewer features than newer versions of Deadwood, but has a smaller binary and works well as a DNS load balancer (either with or without caching). Only use this version if a 64 kilobyte binary is, for whatever reason, too big; this release doesn't handle TTL aging correctly, which, in light of the "Ghost Domain" attack, has security implications.

Deadwood 3.2 is MaraDNS 2.0's recursive resolver.