new

    my $ns = new Net::DNS::Nameserver(
        LocalAddr       => "10.1.2.3",
        LocalPort       => "5353",
        ReplyHandler    => \&reply_handler,
        Verbose         => 1
        );
    my $ns = new Net::DNS::Nameserver(
        LocalAddr       => ['::1' , '127.0.0.1' ],
        LocalPort       => "5353",
        ReplyHandler    => \&reply_handler,
        Verbose         => 1,
        Truncate        => 0
        );

Returns a Net::DNS::Nameserver object, or undef if the object could not be created.

Attributes are:

    LocalAddr           IP address on which to listen.  Defaults to INADDR_ANY.
    LocalPort           Port on which to listen.        Defaults to 53.
    ReplyHandler        Reference to reply-handling
                        subroutine                      Required.
    NotifyHandler       Reference to reply-handling
                        subroutine for queries with
                        opcode NOTIFY (RFC1996)
    Verbose             Print info about received
                        queries.                        Defaults to 0 (off).
    Truncate            Truncates UDP packets that
                        are too big for the reply       Defaults to 1 (on)
    IdleTimeout         TCP clients are disconnected
                        if they are idle longer than
                        this duration.                  Defaults to 120 (secs)

The LocalAddr attribute may alternatively be specified as a list of IP addresses to listen to.

If IO::Socket::INET6 and Socket6 are available on the system you can also list IPv6 addresses and the default is '0' (listen on all interfaces on IPv6 and IPv4);

The ReplyHandler subroutine is passed the query name, query class, query type and optionally an argument containing the peerhost, the incoming query, and the name of the incoming socket (sockethost). It must either return the response code and references to the answer, authority, and additional sections of the response, or undef to leave the query unanswered. Common response codes are:

    NOERROR     No error
    FORMERR     Format error
    SERVFAIL    Server failure
    NXDOMAIN    Non-existent domain (name doesn't exist)
    NOTIMP      Not implemented
    REFUSED     Query refused

For advanced usage it may also contain a headermask containing an hashref with the settings for the "aa", "ra", and "ad" header bits. The argument is of the form "{ ad => 1, aa => 0, ra => 1 }".

See RFC 1035 and the IANA dns-parameters file for more information:

  ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc1035.txt
  http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/dns-parameters

The nameserver will listen for both UDP and TCP connections. On Unix-like systems, the program will probably have to run as root to listen on the default port, 53. A non-privileged user should be able to listen on ports 1024 and higher.

Packet Truncation is new functionality available in VERSION > 830. Only UDP replies are truncated. The size limit is determined by the advertised EDNS0 size in the query, otherwise 512 is used.

If you want to do packet truncation yourself you should set Truncate to 0 and truncate the reply packet in the code of the ReplyHandler.

See "EXAMPLE" for an example.

main_loop

    $ns->main_loop;

Start accepting queries. Calling main_loop never returns.

loop_once

    $ns->loop_once( [TIMEOUT_IN_SECONDS] );

Start accepting queries, but returns. If called without a parameter, the call will not return until a request has been received (and replied to). If called with a number, that number specifies how many seconds (even fractional) to maximum wait before returning. If called with 0 it will return immediately unless there's something to do.

Handling a request and replying obviously depends on the speed of ReplyHandler. Assuming ReplyHandler is super fast, loop_once should spend just a fraction of a second, if called with a timeout value of 0 seconds. One exception is when an AXFR has requested a huge amount of data that the OS is not ready to receive in full. In that case, it will keep running through a loop (while servicing new requests) until the reply has been sent.

In case loop_once accepted a TCP connection it will immediatly check if there is data to be read from the socket. If not it will return and you will have to call loop_once() again to check if there is any data waiting on the socket to be processed. In most cases you will have to count on calling "loop_once" twice.

A code fragment like:

    $ns->loop_once(10);
    while( $ns->get_open_tcp() ){
        $ns->loop_once(0);
    }

Would wait for 10 seconds for the initial connection and would then process all TCP sockets until none is left.

get_open_tcp

In scalar context returns the number of TCP connections for which state is maintained. In array context it returns IO::Socket objects, these could be useful for troubleshooting but be careful using them.