GeoDNS history: why not BIND or PowerDNS

GeoDNS Server
1

I was wondering what motivated @ask and others to write a authoritative DNS server from scratch.

Wasn’t like PowerDNS GeoIP backend available at the time?

BTW, when was GeoDNS first deployed? I see it’s been on GitHub since 2013 it seems, so it’s quite old.

BIND DNS also has a GeoIP patch.

Just wondering.

thanks

2

I think GeoIP is only part of what makes it special. Other features include the ability to share load (according to the preference of the contributor of a particular NTP server) and probably a few other things.

3 
I think GeoIP is only part of what makes it special. Other features include the ability to share load (according to the preference of the contributor of a particular NTP server) and probably a few other things.

geoIP + weights ( load balance) are available on PowerDNS:
https://doc.powerdns.com/authoritative/backends/geoip.html

# this will result first record being handed out 30% of time
   swe.eu.service.geo.example.com:
     - a:
          content: 192.0.2.3
          weight: 50
     - a: 192.0.2.4

So PowerDNS, in theory, does the same as GeoDNS, except for is more complex server – it supports DNSSEC for example

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4

So both PowerDNS and BIND only supported geoIP in 2014, 1 year AFTER GeoDNS:

And GeoDNS has it at least since from 2013 – when the commits on GitHub started

So the answer is: maybe there was no open-source alternative at the time.

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5

GeoDNS was a re-implementation of an older DNS server from ~20 years ago. The NTP Pool used that from about 2005 until the Go implementation. It’s possible either of them would work instead of GeoDNS now.