new¶

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

Creates a nameserver object. 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
                        opdcode NS_NOTIFY (RFC1996)
  Verbose               Print info about received 
                        queries.                        Defaults to 0 (off).

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 incomming socket (sockethost). It must return the response code and references to the answer, authority, and additional sections of the response. 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 headermaks 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.

Returns a Net::DNS::Nameserver object, or undef if the object couldn't be created.

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.