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In former times I used djbdns, compiled from source. Later I found dbndns was available on some Ubuntu boxes I was using, so I started using it instead. It works great, at least on 12.04, 14.04 and 16.04.

Yesterday I wanted to install it on 18.04, but "Unable to locate package dbndns" was the answer. apt-cache search dns didn't point me to a similar small but great dns server, and nor did googling or reading forum posts give me a clue what happened to dbndns.

Has dbndns been replaced by some other software? Has it been moved to another repository? Has it been banned for some reason - maybe Canonical wants to promote another product? Has it been renamed and I overlooked it? Have I to return to compiling the source to get it back?

Thanks for your help!

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According to the Wikipedia page of dbndns, the tool isn't maintained for Debian any longer. Because Ubuntu is based on Debian, the dbndns and djbdns packages are not available for newer versions of Ubuntu, as well.

I don't have definitive information about why the packages have been removed from Debian, but I'd reckon it's related to the tools' age. The last stable release of dbndns is from 2010, the last stable release of djbdns is from 2001(!). Perhaps there was no maintainer who wanted to grapple with integrating it into a current distro, fixing security holes etc.

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I managed to get it installed and working using this deb package http://ftp.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/d/djbdns/dbndns_1.05-8ubuntu2_amd64.deb.

Seems to work fine with Ubunutu 18.04 so far.

All I had to do then was

$sudo apt-get install ./dbndns_1.05-8ubuntu2_amd64.deb

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If you read what was said on Debian, it was all about dnscache, which is what most people would be interested in. Dnscache is useful for anyone, not just servers. Just to have a browser run fast, not waiting more than a second or so on lookups, it's nice to have dnscache. It's way easier than dnsmasq to set up. I use both together for close to zero lookup times even with problems like SERVFAIL and NXDOMAIN.

I'm in Ubuntu 18 versions, and dnscache was not working. I now have Erwin Hoffmann's djbdns with dnscache working. It has ipv6, which I don't care about but some people do.

Erwin Hoffmann is active on djbdns mailing list. So am I right now.

I am using Ubuntu daemontools and daemontools-run packages to manage dnscache. I have /etc/sv/dnscache which works with those Ubuntu tools.

We need a maintainer either here or back in Debian.

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djbdns is back in Debian as of Debian Bullseye (see below). Unfortunately Ubuntu 18.04 is based on Debian Buster, the previous stable version. So for Ubuntu the options to have djbdns include:

  • With Ubuntu 20.04 or newer: djbdns components should show up as available packages since 20.04 is built on top of Debian Bullseye. In fact djbdns is the source package name, for packages you'd install they're called dnscache, tinydns etc according to which components you need (see Debian djbdns package info). Looking at the source of this package it is tied quite closely to the runit package, so you'll probably want to use (and understand) that at the same time, even though runit isn't declared as a dependency. djbdns of old was typically setup with daemontools not runit, so this may be problematic (but I've not explored this in depth).
  • For 18.04 you may be able to configure apt (/etc/apt/sources.d etc) to look for djbdns in a backports or similar repo, but it's too long since I did this to remember the details
  • For 18.04 you could fetch the Debian Bullseye djbdns package source and build your own Debian package for local installation on 18.04.
  • All Ubuntu versions: There's a non-official-Ubuntu/Debian djbdns source package, discussed here that you might like to consider: You'll need to be comfortable working on the command line to install this package from source.
  • For 18.04 also see Zaphod's answer

There had been a package dbndns that stood in for djbdns that I used on systems in the past (probably Ubuntu but could have been Debian), but that appears to have been pulled, or is just super-old; I see it's mentioned in the original question. Looking at the (new) djbdns package changelog dbndns is referred to as a binary package, so that probably relates to the original author of djbdns's licensing conditions which were subsequently relaxed.

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