Author: Nathaniel Swanson

What is Poweradmin?

Poweradmin is a web-based graphical user interface to interact with PowerDNS. It is released under the open source GPL license. It makes it easy to create and edit zone files and interacts directly with the SQL server. Poweradmin has full support for most PowerDNS features, including all zone types (master, native and slave), supermasters, for automatic provisioning of slave zones and full support for A, AAAA, CNAME, HINFO, MX, NS, PTR, SOA, SRV and TXT record types, validation against RFC’s. It also has user and permission management setup for controlling user permissions with templates.  In this tutorial, we’ll be showing you how to install and configure Poweradmin as well as some records.

What is PowerDNS?

PowerDNS (pdns) is a DNS server written in C++. It originally started as proprietary software but was released in 2002 under the open-source GPL license. It is widely used for DNS hosting and is one of the most popular DNS servers for hosting domains using DNSSEC. It can be installed on most UNIX type operating systems. It features support for a large number of backends, including but not limited to MySQL, SQLite3, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, LDAP, Microsoft SQL Server, and BIND like plain text files. It also has a built-in web server for use with their JSON/REST API. PowerDNS can be the authoritative name server for your domains but can also be used as a recursive DNS resolver. The PowerDNS Authoritative Server and the PowerDNS Recursor are separate programs.

VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is a method for sharing a remote desktop environment. Allowing you to remote control another computer or server over the Internet or local network as if you were sitting in front of it. Keyboard and mouse strokes from your computer are relayed to the remote computer/server. There are many different kinds of VNC software available today. Several are cross-platform and add additional features, such as chat or file transfers. VNC is often used for remote technical support and remotely accessing files.