[rbldnsd] Announce: rbldnsd v. 0.996

[Michael Tokarev]

I finally uploaded version 0.996 of rbldnsd, a
nameserver daemon to be used for DNSBLs.

This is a release introducing several new features,
with no noticeable bugfixes.  Here's the NEWS file
fragment:

0.996 (19 Feb 2006)

  - experimental feature: data expiration support, in form
     $TIMESTAMP created expires
    see manpage for details.

  - feature: recognize new 'pass' entry in ACL "dataset", to allow
    whitelisting of a particular network/host covered by another
    ACL entry.

  - bugfix (sort of): deal with possible null-pointer dereferences on some
    systems such as FreeBSD where realloc(smaller_amount) may actually
    return NULL.  Note that this particular malloc implementation (where
    realloc() may return NULL if requested to reallocate to a smaller
    amount of memory) perform very badly with rbldnsd in the first place:
    rbldnsd tries to free some unused memory at the end of data load
    process, and realloc() forces a copy so there will be extra copy of
    a huge data and bad memory fragmentation, so on next reload rbldnsd
    will most likely just run out of memory.  I think it's best to experiment
    with alternative malloc implementation on such systems, eg dmalloc.

  - feature: rbldnsd is now able to read gzip-compressed data files, doing
    transparent on-the-fly decompression, if built with zlib support
    (if built w/o zlib support, it still checks whenever datafile is
    compressed and refuses to load it if it is).  Use -C option to turn
    this feature off.

  - due to zlib support, this version introduces rewritten data-reading
    loop (previously with fgets()) - on some systems this results in
    noticeable (re)load speed improvement on large datasets.

  - number of max nameservers (MAX_NS in rbldnsd.h) increased from 20 to 32,
    per request from Spamhaus.

  - feature: configure script now accepts command-line options (--enable-xx
    and --disable-xx) to turn optional features on/off (including stats,
    ipv6, master-dump and zlib), and saves such options into config.status
    so that automatic re-making will pick up the right options again.

Note the $TIMESTAMP special entry is marked "experimental" still, and
thus it is subject to change in the future, if we will figure out some
better approach.

As usual, rbldnsd can be downloaded (source tarball and debian and redhat
packages) from http://www.corpit.ru/mjt/rbldnsd.html

Enjoy.

/mjt