Welcome to Knot DNS’s documentation!¶

Introduction¶

What is Knot DNS¶

Knot DNS is a high-performance open-source DNS server. It implements only the authoritative domain name service. Knot DNS can reliably serve TLD domains as well as any other zones.

Knot DNS benefits from its multi-threaded and mostly lock-free implementation which allows it to scale well on SMP systems and operate non-stop even when adding or removing zones.

For more info and downloads see www.knot-dns.cz.

Knot DNS features¶

DNS features:

Master and slave operation
Internet class (IN)
DNS extension (EDNS0)
TCP and UDP protocols
Dynamic zone updates
DNSSEC with NSEC and NSEC3
Transaction signature using TSIG
Full and incremental zone transfers (AXFR, IXFR)
Name server identification using NSID or Chaos TXT records
Resource record types A, NS, CNAME, SOA, PTR, HINFO, MINFO, MX, TXT, RP, AFSDB, RT, KEY, AAAA, LOC, SRV, NAPTR, KX, CERT, DNAME, APL, DS, SSHFP, IPSECKEY, RRSIG, NSEC, DNSKEY, DHCID, NSEC3, NSEC3PARAM, TLSA, SMIMEA, CDS, CDNSKEY, OPENPGPKEY, CSYNC, ZONEMD, SPF, NID, L32, L64, LP, EUI48, EUI64, URI, CAA, and Unknown

Server features:

IPv4 and IPv6 support
Semantic zone checks
Server control interface
Zone journal storage
Persistent zone event timers
YAML-based or database-based configuration
Query processing modules with dynamic loading
On-the-fly zone management and server reconfiguration
Multithreaded DNSSEC signing
Automatic DNSSEC key maganement
Offline KSK operation
PKCS #11 interface

Remarkable module extensions:

Response rate limiting
Forward and reverse records synthesis
DNS request traffic statistics
Dnstap traffic logging
Online DNSSEC signing
GeoIP response tailoring supporting ECS and DNSSEC

Remarkable supported networking features:

TCP Fast Open
SO_REUSEPORT (on Linux) or SO_REUSEPORT_LB (on FreeBSD 12.0+)
Binding to non-local addresses (IP_FREEBIND on Linux, IP_BINDANY/IPV6_BINDANY on FreeBSD)
Ignoring PMTU information for IPv4/UDP via IP_PMTUDISC_OMIT

License¶

Knot DNS is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 or (at your option) any later version. The full text of the license is available in the COPYING file distributed with source code.

Requirements¶

Hardware¶

Knot DNS requirements are not very demanding for typical installations, and a commodity server or a virtual solution will be sufficient in most cases.

However, please note that there are some scenarios that will require administrator’s attention and some testing of exact requirements before deploying Knot DNS to a production environment. These cases include deployment for a large number of zones (DNS hosting), large number of records in one or more zones (TLD), or large number of requests.

CPU requirements¶

The server scales with processing power and also with the number of available cores/CPUs. Enabling Hyper-threading is convenient if supported.

There is no lower bound on the CPU requirements, but it should support memory barriers and atomic instructions (i586 and newer).

Network card¶

The best results have been achieved with multi-queue network cards. The number of multi-queues should equal the total number of CPU cores (with Hyper-threading enabled).

Memory requirements¶

The server implementation focuses on performance and thus can be quite memory demanding. The rough estimate for memory requirements is 3 times the size of the zone in the plain-text format. Again this is only an estimate and you are advised to do your own measurements before deploying Knot DNS to production.

Note

To ensure uninterrupted serving of the zone, Knot DNS employs the Read-Copy-Update mechanism instead of locking and thus requires twice the amount of memory for the duration of incoming transfers.

Operating system¶

Knot DNS itself is written in a portable way and can be compiled and run on most UNIX-like systems, such as Linux, *BSD, and macOS.

Required libraries¶

Knot DNS requires a few libraries to be available:

libedit
gnutls >= 3.3
liburcu >= 0.5.4
lmdb >= 0.9.15

Note

The LMDB library is included with Knot DNS source code. However, linking with the system library is preferred.

Optional libraries¶

International Domain Names support (IDNA2008 or IDNA2003) in kdig:

libidn2 (or libidn)

Systemd’s startup notification mechanism and journald logging:

libsystemd

Dnstap support in kdig or module dnstap:

fstrm (and protobuf-c if building from source code)

Linux capabilities(7) support, which allows the server to be started as a non-root user/group, binding to privileged ports (53), and giving up all its capabilities, resulting in a completely unprivileged process:

libcap-ng >= 0.6.4

MaxMind database for geodb support in module geoip:

libmaxminddb0

Installation¶

Installation from a package¶

Knot DNS may already be included in your operating system distribution and therefore can be installed from packages (Linux), ports (BSD), or via Homebrew (macOS). This is always preferred unless you want to test the latest features, contribute to Knot development, or you just know what you are doing.

See the project download page for the latest information.

Installation from source code¶

Required build environment¶

The build process relies on these standard tools:

make
libtool
pkg-config
autoconf >= 2.65
python-sphinx (optional, for documentation building)

GCC at least 4.1 is strictly required for atomic built-ins, but the latest available version is recommended. Another requirements _GNU_SOURCE and C99 support, otherwise it adapts to the compiler available features. LLVM clang compiler since version 2.9 can be used as well.

Getting the source code¶

You can find the source code for the latest release on www.knot-dns.cz. Alternatively, you can fetch the whole project from the git repository https://gitlab.nic.cz/knot/knot-dns.git.

After obtaining the source code, compilation and installation is a quite straightforward process using autotools.

Configuring and generating Makefiles¶

If compiling from the git source, you need to bootstrap the ./configure file first:

$ autoreconf -i -f

In most cases, you can just run configure without any options:

$ ./configure

For all available configure options run:

$ ./configure --help

Compilation¶

After running ./configure you can compile Knot DNS by running make command, which will produce binaries and other related files:

$ make

Note

The compilation with enabled optimizations may take a long time. In such a case the --disable-fastparser configure option can help.

Installation¶

When you have finished building Knot DNS, it’s time to install the binaries and configuration files into the operation system hierarchy. You can do so by executing:

$ make install

When installing as a non-root user, you might have to gain elevated privileges by switching to root user, e.g. sudo make install or su -c 'make install'.

Configuration¶

Simple configuration¶

The following example presents a simple configuration file which can be used as a base for your Knot DNS setup:

# Example of a very simple Knot DNS configuration.

server:
    listen: 0.0.0.0@53
    listen: ::@53

zone:
  - domain: example.com
    storage: /var/lib/knot/zones/
    file: example.com.zone

log:
  - target: syslog
    any: info

Now let’s walk through this configuration step by step:

The listen statement in the server section defines where the server will listen for incoming connections. We have defined the server to listen on all available IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, all on port 53.
The zone section defines the zones that the server will serve. In this case, we defined one zone named example.com which is stored in the zone file /var/lib/knot/zones/example.com.zone.
The log section defines the log facilities for the server. In this example, we told Knot DNS to send its log messages with the severity info or more serious to the syslog (or systemd journal).

For detailed description of all configuration items see Configuration Reference.

Zone templates¶

A zone template allows a single zone configuration to be shared among several zones. The default template identifier is reserved for the default template:

template:
  - id: default
    storage: /var/lib/knot/master
    semantic-checks: on

  - id: signed
    storage: /var/lib/knot/signed
    dnssec-signing: on
    semantic-checks: on
    master: [master1, master2]

  - id: slave
    storage: /var/lib/knot/slave

zone:
  - domain: example1.com     # Uses default template

  - domain: example2.com     # Uses default template
    semantic-checks: off     # Override default settings

  - domain: example.cz
    template: signed
    master: master3          # Override masters to just master3

  - domain: example1.eu
    template: slave
    master: master1

  - domain: example2.eu
    template: slave
    master: master2

Note

Each template option can be explicitly overridden in zone-specific configuration.

Access control list (ACL)¶

The Access control list is a list of rules specifying remotes which are allowed to send certain types of requests to the server. Remotes can be specified by a single IP address or a network subnet. A TSIG key can also be assigned (see keymgr on how to generate a TSIG key).

Without any ACL rules, all the actions are denied for the zone. Each ACL rule can allow one or more actions for a given address/subnet/TSIG, or deny them.

If there are multiple ACL rules for a single zone, they are applied in the order of appearance in the acl configuration item of a zone or a template. The first one to match the given remote is applied, the rest is ignored.

For dynamic updates, additional rules may be specified, which will allow or deny updates according to the type or owner of Resource Records in the update.

See the following examples and ACL section.

acl:
  - id: address_rule
    address: [2001:db8::1, 192.168.2.0/24]
    action: transfer

  - id: deny_rule
    address: 192.168.2.100
    action: transfer
    deny: on

zone:
  - domain: acl1.example.com.
    acl: [deny_rule, address_rule] # deny_rule first here to take precendence

key:
  - id: key1                  # The real TSIG key name
    algorithm: hmac-md5
    secret: Wg==

acl:
  - id: deny_all
    address: 192.168.3.0/24
    deny: on # no action specified and deny on implies denial of all actions

  - id: key_rule
    key: key1                 # Access based just on TSIG key
    action: [transfer, notify]

zone:
  - domain: acl2.example.com
    acl: [deny_all, key_rule]

acl
    - id: owner_type_rule
      action: update
      update-type: [A, AAAA, MX] # Updates are only allowed to update records of the specified types
      update-owner: name         # The allowed owners are specified by the list on the next line
      update-owner-name: [a.example.com, b.example.com, c.example.com]
      update-owner-match: equal  # The owners of records in an update must be exactly equal to the names in the list

Note

If more conditions (address ranges and/or a key) are given in a single ACL rule, all of them have to be satisfied for the rule to match.

Slave zone¶

Knot DNS doesn’t strictly differ between master and slave zones. The only requirement is to have a master statement set for the given zone. Also note that you need to explicitly allow incoming zone changed notifications via notify action through zone’s acl list, otherwise the update will be rejected by the server. If the zone file doesn’t exist it will be bootstrapped over AXFR:

remote:
  - id: master
    address: 192.168.1.1@53

acl:
  - id: notify_from_master
    address: 192.168.1.1
    action: notify

zone:
  - domain: example.com
    storage: /var/lib/knot/zones/
    # file: example.com.zone   # Default value
    master: master
    acl: notify_from_master

Note that the master option accepts a list of multiple remotes. The remotes should be listed according to their preference. The first remote has the highest preference, the other remotes are used for failover. When the server receives a zone update notification from a listed remote, that remote will be the most preferred one for the subsequent transfer.

To use TSIG for transfers and notification messages authentication, configure a TSIG key and assign the key both to the remote and the ACL rule. Notice that the remote and ACL definitions are independent:

key:
  - id: slave1_key
    algorithm: hmac-md5
    secret: Wg==

remote:
  - id: master
    address: 192.168.1.1@53
    key: slave1_key

acl:
  - id: notify_from_master
    address: 192.168.1.1
    key: slave1_key
    action: notify

Note

When transferring a lot of zones, the server may easily get into a state when all available ports are in the TIME_WAIT state, thus the transfers seize until the operating system closes the ports for good. There are several ways to work around this:

Allow reusing of ports in TIME_WAIT (sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse=1)
Shorten TIME_WAIT timeout (tcp_fin_timeout)
Increase available local port count

Master zone¶

An ACL with the transfer action must be configured to allow outgoing zone transfers. An ACL rule consists of a single address or a network subnet:

remote:
  - id: slave1
    address: 192.168.2.1@53

acl:
  - id: slave1_acl
    address: 192.168.2.1
    action: transfer

  - id: others_acl
    address: 192.168.3.0/24
    action: transfer

zone:
  - domain: example.com
    storage: /var/lib/knot/zones/
    file: example.com.zone
    notify: slave1
    acl: [slave1_acl, others_acl]

Optionally, a TSIG key can be specified:

key:
  - id: slave1_key
    algorithm: hmac-md5
    secret: Wg==

remote:
  - id: slave1
    address: 192.168.2.1@53
    key: slave1_key

acl:
  - id: slave1_acl
    address: 192.168.2.1
    key: slave1_key
    action: transfer

  - id: others_acl
    address: 192.168.3.0/24
    action: transfer

Note that a slave zone may serve as a master zone at the same time:

remote:
  - id: master
    address: 192.168.1.1@53
  - id: slave1
    address: 192.168.2.1@53

acl:
  - id: notify_from_master
    address: 192.168.1.1
    action: notify

  - id: slave1_acl
    address: 192.168.2.1
    action: transfer

  - id: others_acl
    address: 192.168.3.0/24
    action: transfer

zone:
  - domain: example.com
    storage: /var/lib/knot/zones/
    file: example.com.zone
    master: master
    notify: slave1
    acl: [notify_from_master, slave1_acl, others_acl]

Dynamic updates¶

Dynamic updates for the zone are allowed via proper ACL rule with the update action. If the zone is configured as a slave and a DNS update message is accepted, the server forwards the message to its primary master. The master’s response is then forwarded back to the originator.

However, if the zone is configured as a master, the update is accepted and processed:

acl:
  - id: update_acl
    address: 192.168.3.0/24
    action: update

zone:
  - domain: example.com
    file: example.com.zone
    acl: update_acl

Automatic DNSSEC signing¶

Knot DNS supports automatic DNSSEC signing for static zones. The signing can operate in two modes:

Automatic key management. In this mode, the server maintains signing keys. New keys are generated according to assigned policy and are rolled automatically in a safe manner. No zone operator intervention is necessary.
Manual key management. In this mode, the server maintains zone signatures only. The signatures are kept up-to-date and signing keys are rolled according to timing parameters assigned to the keys. The keys must be generated and timing parameters must be assigned by the zone operator.

The DNSSEC signing process maintains some metadata which is stored in the KASP database. This database is backed by LMDB.

Warning

Make sure to set the KASP database permissions correctly. For manual key management, the database must be readable by the server process. For automatic key management, it must be writeable. If no HSM is used, the database also contains private key material – don’t set the permissions too weak.

Automatic ZSK management¶

For automatic ZSK management a signing policy has to be configured and assigned to the zone. The policy specifies how the zone is signed (i.e. signing algorithm, key size, key lifetime, signature lifetime, etc.). If no policy is specified or the default one is assigned, the default signing parameters are used.

A minimal zone configuration may look as follows:

zone:
  - domain: myzone.test
    dnssec-signing: on

With a custom signing policy, the policy section will be added:

policy:
  - id: rsa
    algorithm: RSASHA256
    ksk-size: 2048
    zsk-size: 1024

zone:
  - domain: myzone.test
    dnssec-signing: on
    dnssec-policy: rsa

After configuring the server, reload the changes:

$ knotc reload

The server will generate initial signing keys and sign the zone properly. Check the server logs to see whether everything went well.

Warning

This guide assumes that the zone myzone.test was not signed prior to enabling the automatic key management. If the zone was already signed, all existing keys must be imported using keymgr import-bind command before enabling the automatic signing. Also the algorithm in the policy must match the algorithm of all imported keys. Otherwise the zone will be re-signed at all.

Automatic KSK management¶

For automatic KSK management, first configure ZSK management like above, and use additional options in policy section, mostly specifying desired (finite) lifetime for KSK:

remote:
  - id: test_zone_server
    address: 192.168.12.1@53

submission:
  - id: test_zone_sbm
    parent: [test_zone_server]

policy:
  - id: rsa
    algorithm: RSASHA256
    ksk-size: 2048
    zsk-size: 1024
    zsk-lifetime: 30d
    ksk-lifetime: 365d
    ksk-submission: test_zone_sbm

zone:
  - domain: myzone.test
    dnssec-signing: on
    dnssec-policy: rsa

After the initially-generated KSK reaches its lifetime, new KSK is published and after convenience delay the submission is started. The server publishes CDS and CDNSKEY records and the user shall propagate them to the parent. The server periodically checks for DS at the master and when positive, finishes the rollover.

To share KSKs among zones, set the ksk-shared policy parameter. It is strongly discouraged to change the policy id afterwards! The shared key’s creation timestamp will be equal for all zones, but other timers (e.g. activate, retire) may get out of sync.

policy:
  - id: shared
    ...
    ksk-shared: true

zone:
  - domain: firstzone.test
    dnssec-signing: on
    dnssec-policy: shared

zone:
  - domain: secondzone.test
    dnssec-signing: on
    dnssec-policy: shared

Manual key management¶

For automatic DNSSEC signing with manual key management, a signing policy with manual key management flag has to be set:

policy:
  - id: manual
    manual: on

zone:
  - domain: myzone.test
    dnssec-signing: on
    dnssec-policy: manual

To generate signing keys, use the keymgr utility. Let’s use the Single-Type Signing scheme with two algorithms. Run:

$ keymgr myzone.test. generate algorithm=ECDSAP256SHA256
$ keymgr myzone.test. generate algorithm=ED25519

And reload the server. The zone will be signed.

To perform a manual rollover of a key, the timing parameters of the key need to be set. Let’s roll the RSA key. Generate a new RSA key, but do not activate it yet:

$ keymgr myzone.test. generate algorithm=RSASHA256 size=1024 active=+1d

Take the key ID (or key tag) of the old RSA key and disable it the same time the new key gets activated:

$ keymgr myzone.test. set <old_key_id> retire=+1d remove=+1d

Reload the server again. The new key will be published (i.e. the DNSKEY record will be added into the zone). Do not forget to update the DS record in the parent zone to include a reference to the new RSA key. This must happen in one day (in this case) including a delay required to propagate the new DS to caches.

Note that as the +1d time specification is computed from the current time, the key replacement will not happen at once. First, a new key will be activated. A few moments later, the old key will be deactivated and removed. You can use exact time specification to make these two actions happen in one go.

Warning

If you ever decide to switch from manual key management to automatic key management, note that the automatic key management uses zsk-lifetime and ksk-lifetime policy configuration options to schedule key rollovers and it internally uses timestamps of keys differently than in the manual case. As a consequence it might break if the retire or remove timestamps are set for the manually generated keys currently in use. Make sure to set these timestamps to zero using keymgr:

$ keymgr myzone.test. set <key_id> retire=0 remove=0

and configure your policy suitably according to Automatic ZSK management and Automatic KSK management.

Zone signing¶

The signing process consists of the following steps:

Processing KASP database events. (e.g. performing a step of a rollover).
Updating the DNSKEY records. The whole DNSKEY set in zone apex is replaced by the keys from the KASP database. Note that keys added into the zone file manually will be removed. To add an extra DNSKEY record into the set, the key must be imported into the KASP database (possibly deactivated).
Fixing the NSEC or NSEC3 chain.
Removing expired signatures, invalid signatures, signatures expiring in a short time, and signatures issued by an unknown key.
Creating missing signatures. Unless the Single-Type Signing Scheme is used, DNSKEY records in a zone apex are signed by KSK keys and all other records are signed by ZSK keys.
Updating and re-signing SOA record.

The signing is initiated on the following occasions:

Start of the server
Zone reload
Reaching the signature refresh period
Key set changed due to rollover event
Received DDNS update
Forced zone re-sign via server control interface

On a forced zone re-sign, all signatures in the zone are dropped and recreated.

The knotc zone-status command can be used to see when the next scheduled DNSSEC re-sign will happen.

On-slave signing¶

It is possible to enable automatic DNSSEC zone signing even on a slave server. If enabled, the zone is signed after every AXFR/IXFR transfer from master, so that the slave always serves a signed up-to-date version of the zone.

It is strongly recommended to block any outside access to the master server, so that only the slave’s signed version of the zone is served.

Enabled on-slave signing introduces events when the slave zone changes while the master zone remains unchanged, such as a key rollover or refreshing of RRSIG records, which cause inequality of zone SOA serial between master and slave. The slave server handles this by saving the master’s SOA serial in a special variable inside KASP DB and appropriately modifiying AXFR/IXFR queries/answers to keep the communication with master consistent while applying the changes with a different serial.

Note

It is recommended to use UNIX time serial policy on master and incremental serial policy on slave so that their SOA serials are equal most of the time.

The opposite configuration is not supported yet.

Query modules¶

Knot DNS supports configurable query modules that can alter the way queries are processed. Each query requires a finite number of steps to be resolved. We call this set of steps a query plan, an abstraction that groups these steps into several stages.

Before-query processing
Answer, Authority, Additional records packet sections processing
After-query processing

For example, processing an Internet-class query needs to find an answer. Then based on the previous state, it may also append an authority SOA or provide additional records. Each of these actions represents a ‘processing step’. Now, if a query module is loaded for a zone, it is provided with an implicit query plan which can be extended by the module or even changed altogether.

A module is active if its name, which includes the mod- prefix, is assigned to the zone/template module option or to the default template global-module option if activating for all queries. If the module is configurable, a corresponding module section with an identifier must be created and then referenced in the form of module_name/module_id. See Modules for the list of available modules.

Note

Query modules are processed in the order they are specified in the zone/template configuration. In most cases, the recommended order is:

mod-synthrecord, mod-onlinesign, mod-cookies, mod-rrl, mod-dnstap, mod-stats

Performance Tuning¶

Numbers of Workers¶

There are three types of workers ready for parallel execution of performance-oriented tasks: UDP workers, TCP workers, and Background workers. The first two types handle all network requests coming through UDP and TCP protocol (respectively) and do all the response job for common queries. Background workers process changes to the zone.

By default, Knot determines well-fitting number of workers based on the number of CPU cores. The user can specify the numbers of workers for each type with configuration/server section: udp-workers, tcp-workers, background-workers.

An indication on when to increase number of workers is a situation when the server is lagging behind the expected performance, while the CPU usage is low. This is usually because of waiting for network or I/O response during the operation. It may be caused by Knot design not fitting well the usecase. The user should try increasing the number of workers (of the related type) slightly above 100 and if the performance gets better, he can decide about further exact setting.

Sysctl and NIC optimizations¶

There are several recommendations based on Knot developers’ experience with their specific HW and SW (mainstream Intel-based servers, Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution). They may or may not positively (or negatively) influence performance in common use cases.

If your NIC driver allows it (see /proc/interrupts for hint), set CPU affinity (/proc/irq/$IRQ/smp_affinity) manually so that each NIC channel is served by unique CPU core(s). You must turn off irqbalance service before to avoid configuration override.

Configure sysctl as follows:

socket_bufsize=1048576
busy_latency=0
backlog=40000
optmem_max=20480

net.core.wmem_max     = $socket_bufsize
net.core.wmem_default = $socket_bufsize
net.core.rmem_max     = $socket_bufsize
net.core.rmem_default = $socket_bufsize
net.core.busy_read = $busy_latency
net.core.busy_poll = $busy_latency
net.core.netdev_max_backlog = $backlog
net.core.optmem_max = $optmem_max

Disable huge pages.

Configure your CPU to “performance” mode. This can be achieved depending on architecture, e.g. in BIOS, or e.g. configuring /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor to “performance”.

Tune your NIC device with ethtool:

ethtool -A $dev autoneg off rx off tx off
ethtool -K $dev tso off gro off ufo off
ethtool -G $dev rx 4096 tx 4096
ethtool -C $dev rx-usecs 75
ethtool -C $dev tx-usecs 75
ethtool -N $dev rx-flow-hash udp4 sdfn
ethtool -N $dev rx-flow-hash udp6 sdfn

On FreeBSD you can just:

ifconfig ${dev} -rxcsum -txcsum -lro -tso

Knot developers are open to hear about users’ further suggestions about network devices tuning/optimization.

Operation¶

The Knot DNS server part knotd can run either in the foreground, or in the background using the -d option. When run in the foreground, it doesn’t create a PID file. Other than that, there are no differences and you can control both the same way.

The tool knotc is designed as a user front-end, making it easier to control running server daemon. If you want to control the daemon directly, use SIGINT to quit the process or SIGHUP to reload the configuration.

If you pass neither configuration file (-c parameter) nor configuration database (-C parameter), the server will first attempt to use the default configuration database stored in /var/lib/knot/confdb or the default configuration file stored in /etc/knot/knot.conf. Both the default paths can be reconfigured with --with-storage=path or --with-configdir=path respectively.

Example of server start as a daemon:

$ knotd -d -c knot.conf

Example of server shutdown:

$ knotc -c knot.conf stop

For a complete list of actions refer to the program help (-h parameter) or to the corresponding manual page.

Also, the server needs to create rundir and storage directories in order to run properly.

Configuration database¶

In the case of a huge configuration file, the configuration can be stored in a binary database. Such a database can be simply initialized:

$ knotc conf-init

or preloaded from a file:

$ knotc conf-import input.conf

Also the configuration database can be exported into a textual file:

$ knotc conf-export output.conf

Warning

The import and export commands access the configuration database directly, without any interaction with the server. So it is strictly recommended to perform these operations when the server is not running.

Dynamic configuration¶

The configuration database can be accessed using the server control interface while the server is running. To get the full power of the dynamic configuration, the server must be started with a specified configuration database location or with the default database initialized. Otherwise all the changes to the configuration will be temporary (until the server is stopped).

Note

The database can be imported in advance.

Most of the commands get an item name and value parameters. The item name is in the form of section[identifier].name. If the item is multivalued, more values can be specified as individual (command line) arguments.

Caution

Beware of the possibility of pathname expansion by the shell. For this reason, it is advisable to slash square brackets or to quote command parameters if not executed in the interactive mode.

To get the list of configuration sections or to get the list of section items:

$ knotc conf-list
$ knotc conf-list 'server'

To get the whole configuration or to get the whole configuration section or to get all section identifiers or to get a specific configuration item:

$ knotc conf-read
$ knotc conf-read 'remote'
$ knotc conf-read 'zone.domain'
$ knotc conf-read 'zone[example.com].master'

Warning

The following operations don’t work on OpenBSD!

Modifying operations require an active configuration database transaction. Just one transaction can be active at a time. Such a transaction then can be aborted or committed. A semantic check is executed automatically before every commit:

$ knotc conf-begin
$ knotc conf-abort
$ knotc conf-commit

To set a configuration item value or to add more values or to add a new section identifier or to add a value to all identified sections:

$ knotc conf-set 'server.identity' 'Knot DNS'
$ knotc conf-set 'server.listen' '0.0.0.0@53' '::@53'
$ knotc conf-set 'zone[example.com]'
$ knotc conf-set 'zone.slave' 'slave2'

Note

Also the include operation can be performed. A non-absolute file location is relative to the server binary path, not to the control binary path!

$ knotc conf-set 'include' '/tmp/new_zones.conf'

To unset the whole configuration or to unset the whole configuration section or to unset an identified section or to unset an item or to unset a specific item value:

$ knotc conf-unset
$ knotc conf-unset 'zone'
$ knotc conf-unset 'zone[example.com]'
$ knotc conf-unset 'zone[example.com].master'
$ knotc conf-unset 'zone[example.com].master' 'remote2' 'remote5'

To get the change between the current configuration and the active transaction for the whole configuration or for a specific section or for a specific identified section or for a specific item:

$ knotc conf-diff
$ knotc conf-diff 'zone'
$ knotc conf-diff 'zone[example.com]'
$ knotc conf-diff 'zone[example.com].master'

An example of possible configuration initialization:

$ knotc conf-begin
$ knotc conf-set 'server.listen' '0.0.0.0@53' '::@53'
$ knotc conf-set 'remote[master_server]'
$ knotc conf-set 'remote[master_server].address' '192.168.1.1'
$ knotc conf-set 'template[default]'
$ knotc conf-set 'template[default].storage' '/var/lib/knot/zones/'
$ knotc conf-set 'template[default].master' 'master_server'
$ knotc conf-set 'zone[example.com]'
$ knotc conf-diff
$ knotc conf-commit

Slave mode¶

Running the server as a slave is very straightforward as you usually bootstrap zones over AXFR and thus avoid any manual zone operations. In contrast to AXFR, when the incremental transfer finishes, it stores the differences in the journal file and doesn’t update the zone file immediately but after the zonefile-sync period elapses.

Master mode¶

If you just want to check the zone files before starting, you can use:

$ knotc zone-check example.com

For an approximate estimation of server’s memory consumption, you can use:

$ knotc zone-memstats example.com

This action prints the count of resource records, percentage of signed records and finally estimation of memory consumption for each zone, unless specified otherwise. Please note that the estimated values may differ from the actual consumption. Also, for slave servers with incoming transfers enabled, be aware that the actual memory consumption might be double or higher during transfers.

Reading and editing zones¶

Knot DNS allows you to read or change zone contents online using server control interface.

Warning

Avoid concurrent zone access when a zone event (zone file load, refresh, DNSSEC signing, dynamic update) is in progress or pending. In such a case zone events must be frozen before. For more information how to freeze the zone read Reading and editing the zone file safely.

To get contents of all configured zones, or a specific zone contents, or zone records with a specific owner, or even with a specific record type:

$ knotc zone-read --
$ knotc zone-read example.com
$ knotc zone-read example.com ns1
$ knotc zone-read example.com ns1 NS

Note

If the record owner is not a fully qualified domain name, then it is considered as a relative name to the zone name.

To start a writing transaction on all zones or on specific zones:

$ knotc zone-begin --
$ knotc zone-begin example.com example.net

Now you can list all nodes within the transaction using the `zone-get` command, which always returns current data with all changes included. The command has the same syntax as `zone-read`.

Within the transaction, you can add a record to a specific zone or to all zones with an open transaction:

$ knotc zone-set example.com ns1 3600 A 192.168.0.1
$ knotc zone-set -- ns1 3600 A 192.168.0.1

To remove all records with a specific owner, or a specific rrset, or a specific record data:

$ knotc zone-unset example.com ns1
$ knotc zone-unset example.com ns1 A
$ knotc zone-unset example.com ns1 A 192.168.0.2

To see the difference between the original zone and the current version:

$ knotc zone-diff example.com

Finally, either commit or abort your transaction:

$ knotc zone-commit example.com
$ knotc zone-abort example.com

A full example of setting up a completely new zone from scratch:

$ knotc conf-begin
$ knotc conf-set zone.domain example.com
$ knotc conf-commit
$ knotc zone-begin example.com
$ knotc zone-set example.com @ 7200 SOA ns hostmaster 1 86400 900 691200 3600
$ knotc zone-set example.com ns 3600 A 192.168.0.1
$ knotc zone-set example.com www 3600 A 192.168.0.100
$ knotc zone-commit example.com

Note

If quotes are necessary for record data specification, don’t forget to escape them:

$ knotc zone-set example.com @ 3600 TXT \"v=spf1 a:mail.example.com -all\"

Reading and editing the zone file safely¶

It’s always possible to read and edit zone contents via zone file manipulation. However, it may lead to confusion if the zone contents are continuously being changed by DDNS, DNSSEC signing and the like. In such a case, the safe way to modify the zone file is to freeze zone events first:

$ knotc -b zone-freeze example.com.
$ knotc -b zone-flush example.com.

After calling freeze to the zone, there still may be running zone operations (e.g. signing), causing freeze pending. Because of it the blocking mode is used to ensure the operation was finished. Then the zone can be flushed to a file.

Now the zone file can be safely modified (e.g. using a text editor). If zonefile-load is not set to difference-no-serial, it’s also necessary to increase SOA serial in this step to keep consistency. Finally, we can load the modified zone file and if successful, thaw the zone:

$ knotc -b zone-reload example.com.
$ knotc zone-thaw example.com.

Zone loading¶

The process how the server loads a zone is influenced by the configuration of the zonefile-load and journal-content parameters (also DNSSEC signing applies), the existence of a zone file and journal (and their relative out-of-dateness), and whether it is a cold start of the server or a zone reload (e.g. invoked by the knotc interface). Please note that zone transfers are not taken into account here – they are planned after the zone is loaded (including AXFR bootstrap).

If the zone file exists and is not excluded by the configuration, it is first loaded and according to its SOA serial number relevant journal changesets are applied. If this is a zone reload and we have zonefile-load set to difference, the difference between old and new contents is computed and stored into the journal like an update. The zone file should be either unchaged since last load or changed with incremented SOA serial. In the case of a decreased SOA serial, the load is interrupted with an error; if unchanged, it is increased by the server.

If the procedure described above succeeds without errors, the resulting zone contents are (after potential DNSSEC signing) used as the new zone.

The option journal-content set to all lets the server, beside better performance, to keep track of the zone contents also across server restarts. It makes the cold start effectively work like a zone reload with the old contents loaded from the journal (unless this is the very first start with the zone not yet saved into the journal).

Journal behaviour¶

The zone journal keeps some history of changes made to the zone. It is useful for responding to IXFR queries. Also if zone file flush is disabled, journal keeps diff between the zone file and zone for the case of server shutdown. The history is stored in changesets – diffs of zone contents between two (usually subsequent) zone serials.

Journals of all zones are stored in a common LMDB database. Huge changesets are split into 70 KiB [1] blocks to prevent fragmentation of the DB. Journal does each operation in one transaction to keep consistency of the DB and performance. The exception is when store transaction exceeds 5 % of the whole DB mapsize, it is split into multiple ones and some dirty-chunks-management involves.

Each zone journal has own usage limit on how much DB space it may occupy. Before hitting the limit, changesets are stored one-by-one and whole history is linear. While hitting the limit, the zone is flushed into the zone file, and oldest changesets are deleted as needed to free some space. Actually, twice [1] the needed amount is deleted to prevent too frequent deletes. Further zone file flush is invoked after the journal runs out of deletable “flushed changesets”.

If zone file flush is disabled, then instead of flushing the zone, the journal tries to save space by merging older changesets into one. It works well if the changes rewrite each other, e.g. periodically changing few zone records, re-signing whole zone… The difference between the zone file and the zone is thus preserved, even if journal deletes some older changesets.

If the journal is used to store both zone history and contents, a special changeset is present with zone contents. When the journal gets full, the changes are merged into this special changeset.

There is also a safety hard limit for overall journal database size, but it’s strongly recommended to set the per-zone limits in a way to prevent hitting this one. For LMDB, it’s hard to recover from the database-full state. For wiping one zone’s journal, see knotc zone-purge +journal command.

[1]	(1, 2) This constant is hardcoded.

Handling zone file, journal, changes, serials¶

Some configuration options regarding the zone file and journal, together with operation procedures, might lead to unexpected results. This chapter shall point out some interference and both recommend and warn before some combinations thereof. Unfortunately, there is no optimal combination of configuration options, every approach has some disadvantages.

Example 1¶

Keep the zone file updated:

zonefile-sync: 0
zonefile-load: whole
journal-content: changes

This is actually setting default values. The user can always check the current zone contents in the zone file, and also modify it (recommended with server turned-off or taking the safe way). Journal serves here just as a source of history for slaves’ IXFR. Some users dislike that the server overwrites their prettily prepared zone file.

Example 2¶

Zonefileless setup:

zonefile-sync: -1
zonefile-load: none
journal-content: all

Zone contents are stored just in the journal. The zone is updated by DDNS, zone transfer, or via the control interface. The user might have filled the zone contents initially from a zone file by setting zonefile-load to whole temporarily. It’s also a good setup for slaves. Anyway, it’s recommended to carefully tune the journal-size-related options to avoid surprises of journal getting full.

Example 3¶

Input-only zone file:

zonefile-sync: -1
zonefile-load: difference
journal-content: changes

The user can make changes to the zone by editing the zone file, and his pretty zone file gets never overwritten and filled with DNSSEC-related autogenerated records – they are only stored in the journal.

The zone file’s SOA serial must be properly set to a number which is higher than the current SOA serial in the zone (not in the zone file) if manually updated!

Note

In the case of zonefile-load is set to difference-no-serial, the SOA serial is handled by the server automatically during server reload.

DNSSEC key states¶

During its lifetime, DNSSEC key finds itself in different states. Most of the time it is usually used for signing the zone and published in the zone. In order to change this state, one type of a key rollover is necessary, and during this rollover, the key goes through various states, with respect to the rollover type and also the state of the other key being rolled-over.

First, let’s list the states of the key being rolled-in.

Standard states:

active — The key is used for signing.
published — The key is published in the zone, but not used for signing.
ready (only for KSK) — The key is published in the zone and used for signing. The old key is still active, since we are waiting for the DS records in the parent zone to be updated (i.e. “KSK submission”).

Special states for algorithm rollover:

pre-active — The key is not yet published in the zone, but it’s used for signing the zone.
published — The key is published in the zone, and it’s still used for signing since the pre-active state.

Second, we list the states of the key being rolled-out.

Standard states:

retire-active — The key is still used for signing and published in the zone, waiting for the updated DS records in parent zone to be acked by resolvers (KSK case) or synchronizing with KSK during algorithm rollover (ZSK case).
retired — The key is no longer used for signing, but still published in the zone.
removed — The key is not used in any way (in most cases such keys are deleted immediately).

Special states for algorithm rollover:

post-active — The key is no longer published in the zone, but still used for signing.

The states listed above are relevant for keymgr operations like generating a key, setting its timers and listing KASP database.

On the other hand, the key “states” displayed in the server log lines while zone signing are not according to listed above, but just a hint what the key is currently used to (e.g. “public, active” = key is published in the zone and used for signing).

DNSSEC key rollovers¶

This section describes the process of DNSSEC key rollover and its implementation in Knot DNS, and how the operator might watch and check that it’s working correctly. The prerequisite is automatic zone signing with enabled automatic key management.

The KSK and ZSK rollovers are triggered by the respective zone key getting old according to the settings (see KSK and ZSK lifetimes).

The algorithm rollover happens when the policy algorithm field is updated to a different value.

The signing scheme rollover happens when the policy signing scheme field is changed.

It’s also possible to change the algorithm and signing scheme in one rollover.

The operator may check the next rollover phase time by watching the next zone signing time, either in the log or via knotc zone-status. There is no special log for finishing a rollover.

Note

There are never two key rollovers running in parallel for one zone. If a rollover is triggered while another is in progress, it waits until the first one is finished.

The ZSK rollover is performed with Pre-publish method, KSK rollover uses Double-Signature scheme, as described in RFC 6781.

Automatic KSK and ZSK rollovers example¶

Let’s start with the following set of keys:

2019-07-15T20:57:58 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 58209, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, KSK, public, active
2019-07-15T20:57:58 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 34273, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, public, active

The last fields hint the key state: public denotes a key that will be presented as the DNSKEY record, ready means that CDS/CDNSKEY records were created, active tells us if the key is used for signing.

For demonstration purposes, the following configuration is used:

submission:
 - id: test_submission
   check-interval: 2s
   parent: dnssec_validating_resolver

policy:
 - id: test_policy
   ksk-lifetime: 5m
   zsk-lifetime: 2m
   propagation-delay: 2s
   dnskey-ttl: 10s
   zone-max-ttl: 15s
   ksk-submission: test_submission

Upon the zone’s KSK lifetime expiration, the rollover continues along the lines of RFC 6781#section-4.1.2:

# KSK Rollover

2019-07-15T20:58:00 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing zone
2019-07-15T20:58:00 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, KSK rollover started
2019-07-15T20:58:00 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 32925, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, KSK, public
2019-07-15T20:58:00 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 58209, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, KSK, public, active
2019-07-15T20:58:00 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 34273, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, public, active
2019-07-15T20:58:00 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing started
2019-07-15T20:58:00 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, successfully signed
2019-07-15T20:58:00 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, next signing at 2019-07-15T20:58:12

... (propagation-delay + dnskey-ttl) ...

2019-07-15T20:58:12 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing zone
2019-07-15T20:58:12 notice: [example.com.] DNSSEC, KSK submission, waiting for confirmation
2019-07-15T20:58:12 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 58209, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, KSK, public, active
2019-07-15T20:58:12 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 32925, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, KSK, public, ready, active
2019-07-15T20:58:12 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 34273, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, public, active
2019-07-15T20:58:12 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing started
2019-07-15T20:58:12 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, successfully signed
2019-07-15T20:58:12 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, next signing at 2019-07-22T20:57:54

At this point the new KSK has to be submitted to the parent zone. Knot detects the updated parent’s DS record automatically (and waits for additional period of the DS’s TTL before retiring the old key) if parent DS check is configured, otherwise the operator must confirm it manually (using knotc zone-ksk-submitted):

2019-07-15T20:58:12 info: [example.com.] DS check, outgoing, remote ::1@27455, KSK submission check: negative
2019-07-15T20:58:14 info: [example.com.] DS check, outgoing, remote ::1@27455, KSK submission check: negative
2019-07-15T20:58:16 info: [example.com.] DS check, outgoing, remote ::1@27455, KSK submission check: positive
2019-07-15T20:58:16 notice: [example.com.] DNSSEC, KSK submission, confirmed
2019-07-15T20:58:16 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing zone
2019-07-15T20:58:16 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 32925, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, KSK, public, active
2019-07-15T20:58:16 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 58209, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, KSK, public, active+
2019-07-15T20:58:16 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 34273, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, public, active
2019-07-15T20:58:16 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing started
2019-07-15T20:58:16 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, successfully signed
2019-07-15T20:58:16 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, next signing at 2019-07-15T20:58:23

... (parent's DS TTL is 7 seconds) ...

2019-07-15T20:58:23 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing zone
2019-07-15T20:58:23 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 58209, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, KSK, public
2019-07-15T20:58:23 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 32925, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, KSK, public, active
2019-07-15T20:58:23 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 34273, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, public, active
2019-07-15T20:58:23 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing started
2019-07-15T20:58:23 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, successfully signed
2019-07-15T20:58:23 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, next signing at 2019-07-15T20:58:35

... (propagation-delay + dnskey-ttl) ...

2019-07-15T20:58:35 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing zone
2019-07-15T20:58:35 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 32925, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, KSK, public, active
2019-07-15T20:58:35 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 34273, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, public, active
2019-07-15T20:58:35 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing started
2019-07-15T20:58:35 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, successfully signed
2019-07-15T20:58:35 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, next signing at 2019-07-15T20:59:54

Upon the zone’s ZSK lifetime expiration, the rollover continues along the lines of RFC 6781#section-4.1.1:

# ZSK Rollover

2019-07-15T20:59:54 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing zone
2019-07-15T20:59:54 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, ZSK rollover started
2019-07-15T20:59:54 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 32925, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, KSK, public, active
2019-07-15T20:59:54 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag  3608, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, public
2019-07-15T20:59:54 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 34273, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, public, active
2019-07-15T20:59:54 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing started
2019-07-15T20:59:54 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, successfully signed
2019-07-15T20:59:54 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, next signing at 2019-07-15T21:00:06

... (propagation-delay + dnskey-ttl) ...

2019-07-15T21:00:06 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing zone
2019-07-15T21:00:06 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 32925, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, KSK, public, active
2019-07-15T21:00:06 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 34273, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, public
2019-07-15T21:00:06 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag  3608, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, public, active
2019-07-15T21:00:06 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing started
2019-07-15T21:00:06 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, successfully signed
2019-07-15T21:00:06 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, next signing at 2019-07-15T21:00:23

... (propagation-delay + zone-max-ttl) ...

2019-07-15T21:00:23 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing zone
2019-07-15T21:00:23 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 32925, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, KSK, public, active
2019-07-15T21:00:23 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag  3608, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, public, active
2019-07-15T21:00:23 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing started
2019-07-15T21:00:23 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, successfully signed
2019-07-15T21:00:23 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, next signing at 2019-07-15T21:02:06

Further rollovers:

... (zsk-lifetime - propagation-delay - zone-max-ttl) ...

# Another ZSK Rollover

2019-07-15T21:02:06 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing zone
2019-07-15T21:02:06 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, ZSK rollover started
2019-07-15T21:02:06 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 32925, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, KSK, public, active
2019-07-15T21:02:06 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 32841, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, public
2019-07-15T21:02:06 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag  3608, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, public, active
2019-07-15T21:02:06 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing started
2019-07-15T21:02:06 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, successfully signed
2019-07-15T21:02:06 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, next signing at 2019-07-15T21:02:18

...

# Another KSK Rollover

2019-07-15T21:03:00 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing zone
2019-07-15T21:03:00 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, KSK rollover started
2019-07-15T21:03:00 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 27452, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, KSK, public
2019-07-15T21:03:00 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 32925, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, KSK, public, active
2019-07-15T21:03:00 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, key, tag 32841, algorithm ECDSAP256SHA256, public, active
2019-07-15T21:03:00 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, signing started
2019-07-15T21:03:00 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, successfully signed
2019-07-15T21:03:00 info: [example.com.] DNSSEC, next signing at 2019-07-15T21:03:12

...

Tip

If systemd is available, the KSK submission event is logged into journald in a structured way. The intended use case is to trigger a user-created script. Example:

journalctl -f -t knotd -o json | python3 -c '
import json, sys
for line in sys.stdin:
  k = json.loads(line);
  if "KEY_SUBMISSION" in k:
    print("%s, zone=%s, keytag=%s" % (k["__REALTIME_TIMESTAMP"], k["ZONE"], k["KEY_SUBMISSION"]))
'

DNSSEC shared KSK¶

Knot DNS allows, with automatic DNSSEC key management, to configure a shared KSK for multiple zones. By enabling ksk-shared, we tell Knot to share all newly-created KSKs among all the zones with the same DNSSEC signing policy assigned.

The feature works as follows. Each zone still manages its keys separately. If a new KSK shall be generated for the zone, it first checks if it can grab another zone’s shared KSK instead - that is the last generated KSK in any of the zones with the same policy assigned. Anyway, only the cryptographic material is shared, the key may have different timers in each zone.

Consequences:

If we have an initial setting with brand new zones without any DNSSEC keys, the initial keys for all zones are generated. With shared KSK, they will all have the same KSK, but different ZSKs. The KSK rollovers may take place at slightly different time for each of the zones, but the resulting new KSK will be shared again among all of them.

If we have zones already having their keys, turning on the shared KSK feature triggers no action. But when a KSK rollover takes place, they will use the same new key afterwards.

DNSSEC delete algorithm¶

This is a way how to “disconnect” a signed zone from DNSSEC-aware parent zone. More precisely, we tell the parent zone to remove our zone’s DS record by publishing a special formatted CDNSKEY and CDS record. This is mostly useful if we want to turn off DNSSEC on our zone so it becomes insecure, but not bogus.

With automatic DNSSEC signing and key management by Knot, this is as easy as configuring cds-cdnskey-publish option and reloading the configuration. We check if the special CDNSKEY and CDS records with the rdata “0 3 0 AA==” and “0 0 0 00”, respectively, appeared in the zone.

After the parent zone notices and reflects the change, we wait for TTL expire (so all resolvers’ caches get updated), and finally we may do anything with the zone, e.g. turning off DNSSEC, removing all the keys and signatures as desired.

DNSSEC Offline KSK¶

Knot DNS allows a special mode of operation where the private part of the Key Signing Key is not available to the daemon, but it is rather stored securely in an offline storage. This requires that the KSK/ZSK signing scheme is used (i.e. single-type-signing is off). The Zone Signing Key is always fully available to the daemon in order to sign common changes to the zone contents.

The server (or the “ZSK side”) only uses ZSK to sign zone contents and its changes. Before performing a ZSK rollover, the DNSKEY records will be pre-generated and signed by the signer (the “KSK side”). Both sides exchange keys in the form of human-readable messages with the help of keymgr utility.

Pre-requisites¶

For the ZSK side (i.e. the operator of the DNS server), the pre-requisites are:

properly configured DNSSEC policy (e.g. zsk-lifetime),
manual set to on
offline-ksk set to on
dnskey-ttl and zone-max-ttl set up explicitly
a complete KASP DB with just ZSK(s)

For the KSK side (i.e. the operator of the KSK signer), the pre-requisites are:

Knot configuration equal to the ZSK side (at least relevant parts of corresponding policy, zone, and template sections must be identical)
a KASP DB with the KSK(s)

Generating and signing future ZSKs¶

Use the keymgr pregenerate command on the ZSK side to prepare the ZSKs for a specified period of time in the future. The following example generates ZSKs for the example.com zone for 6 months ahead starting from now:
```
$ keymgr -c /path/to/ZSK/side.conf example.com. pregenerate +6mo
```
If the time period is selected as e.g. 2 x zsk-lifetime + 4 x propagation-delay, it will prepare roughly two complete future key rollovers. The newly-generated ZSKs remain in non-published state until their rollover starts, i.e. the time they would be generated in case of automatic key management.
Use the keymgr generate-ksr command on the ZSK side to export the public parts of the future ZSKs in a form similar to DNSKEY records. You might use the same time period as in the first step:
```
$ keymgr -c /path/to/ZSK/side.conf example.com. generate-ksr +0 +6mo > /path/to/ksr/file
```
Save the output of the command (called the Key Signing Request or KSR) to a file and transfer it to the KSK side e.g. via e-mail.
Use the keymgr sign-ksr command on the KSK side with the KSR file from the previous step as a parameter:
```
$ keymgr -c /path/to/KSK/side.conf example.com. sign-ksr /path/to/ksr/file > /path/to/skr/file
```
This creates all the future forms of the DNSKEY, CDNSKEY and CSK records and all the respective RRSIGs and prints them on output. Save the output of the command (called the Signed Key Response or SKR) to a file and transfer it back to the ZSK side.
Use the keymgr import-skr command to import the records and signatures from the SKR file generated in the last step into the KASP DB on the ZSK side:
```
$ keymgr -c /path/to/ZSK/side.conf example.com. import-skr /path/to/skr/file
```
Use the knotc zone-sign command to trigger a zone re-sign on the ZSK-side and set up the future re-signing events correctly.:
```
$ knotc -c /path/to/ZSK/side.conf zone-sign example.com.
```
Now the future ZSKs and DNSKEY records with signatures are ready in KASP DB for later usage. Knot automatically uses them in correct time intervals. The entire procedure must to be repeated before the time period selected at the beginning passes, or whenever a configuration is changed significantly. Over-importing new SKR across some previously-imported one leads to deleting the old offline records.

Export/import KASP DB¶

If you would like make a backup of your KASP DB or transfer your cryptographic keys to a different server, you may utilize the mdb_dump and mdb_load tools provided by the lmdb-utils package on Ubuntu and Debian or by the lmdb package on Fedora, CentOS and RHEL. These tools allow you to convert the contents of any LMDB database to a portable plain text format which can be imported to any other LMDB database. Note that the keys subdirectory of the kasp-db directory containing the *.pem files has to be copied separately.

Note

Make sure to freeze DNSSEC events on a running server prior to applying the following commands to its KASP DB. Use the knotc zone-freeze and knotc zone-thaw commands as described in Reading and editing the zone file safely.

Use the mdb_dump -a command with the configured kasp-db directory as an argument to convert the contents of the LMDB database to a portable text format:

$ mdb_dump -a /path/to/keys

Save the output of the command to a text file. You may then import the file into a different LMDB database using the mdb_load -f command, supplying the path to the file and the path to the database directory as arguments:

$ mdb_load -f /path/to/dump_file /path/to/keys

Note

Depending on your use case, it might be necessary to call knotc zone-sign (e.g. to immediately sign the zones with the new imported keys) or knotc zone-reload (e.g. to refresh DNSSEC signatures generated by the geoip module) after importing new content into the KASP DB of a running server.

Daemon controls¶

Knot DNS was designed to allow server reconfiguration on-the-fly without interrupting its operation. Thus it is possible to change both configuration and zone files and also add or remove zones without restarting the server. This can be done with:

$ knotc reload

If you want to refresh the slave zones, you can do this with:

$ knotc zone-refresh

Statistics¶

The server provides some general statistics and optional query module statistics (see mod-stats).

Server statistics or global module statistics can be shown by:

$ knotc stats
$ knotc stats server             # Show all server counters
$ knotc stats mod-stats          # Show all mod-stats counters
$ knotc stats server.zone-count  # Show specific server counter

Per zone statistics can be shown by:

$ knotc zone-stats example.com mod-stats

To show all supported counters even with 0 value use the force option.

A simple periodic statistic dumping to a YAML file can also be enabled. See Statistics section for the configuration details.

As the statistics data can be accessed over the server control socket, it is possible to create an arbitrary script (Python is supported at the moment) which could, for example, publish the data in the JSON format via HTTP(S) or upload the data to a more efficient time series database. Take a look into the python folder of the project for these scripts.

Troubleshooting¶

First of all, check the logs. Enabling at least the warning message severity may help you to identify some problems. See the Logging section for details.

Reporting bugs¶

If you are unable to solve the problem by yourself, you can submit a bugreport to the Knot DNS developers. For security or sensitive issues contact the developers directly on knot-dns@labs.nic.cz. All other bugs and questions may be directed to the public Knot DNS users mailing list (knot-dns-users@lists.nic.cz) or may be entered into the issue tracking system.

Before anything else, please try to answer the following questions:

Has it been working?
What has changed? System configuration, software updates, network configuration, firewall rules modification, hardware replacement, etc.

The bugreport should contain the answers for the previous questions and in addition at least the following information:

Knot DNS version and type of installation (distribution package, from source, etc.)
Operating system, platform, kernel version
Relevant basic hardware information (processor, amount of memory, available network devices, etc.)
Description of the bug
Log output with the highest verbosity (category any, severity debug)
Steps to reproduce the bug (if known)
Backtrace (if the bug caused a crash or a hang; see the next section)

If possible, please provide a minimal configuration file and zone files which can be used to reproduce the bug.

Generating backtrace¶

Backtrace carries basic information about the state of the program and how the program got where it is. It helps determining the location of the bug in the source code.

If you run Knot DNS from distribution packages, make sure the debugging symbols for the package are installed. The symbols are usually distributed in a separate package.

There are several ways to get the backtrace. One possible way is to extract the backtrace from a core dump file. Core dump is a memory snapshot generated by the operating system when a process crashes. The generating of core dumps must be usually enabled:

$ ulimit -c unlimited                  # Enable unlimited core dump size
$ knotd ...                            # Reproduce the crash
...
$ gdb knotd <core-dump-file>           # Start gdb on the core dump
(gdb) info threads                     # Get a summary of all threads
(gdb) thread apply all bt full         # Extract backtrace from all threads
(gdb) quit

To save the backtrace into a file, the following GDB commands can be used:

(gdb) set pagination off
(gdb) set logging file backtrace.txt
(gdb) set logging on
(gdb) info threads
(gdb) thread apply all bt full
(gdb) set logging off

To generate a core dump of a running process, the gcore utility can be used:

$ gcore -o <output-file> $(pidof knotd)

Please note that core dumps can be intercepted by an error-collecting system service (systemd-coredump, ABRT, Apport, etc.). If you are using such a service, consult its documentation about core dump retrieval.

If the error is reproducible, it is also possible to start and inspect the server directly in the debugger:

$ gdb --args knotd -c /etc/knot.conf
(gdb) run
...

Alternatively, the debugger can be attached to a running server process. This is generally useful when troubleshooting a stuck process:

$ knotd ...
$ gdb --pid $(pidof knotd)
(gdb) continue
...

If you fail to get a backtrace of a running process using the previous method, you may try the single-purpose pstack utility:

$ pstack $(pidof knotd) > backtrace.txt

Configuration Reference¶

Description¶

Configuration files for Knot DNS use simplified YAML format. Simplified means that not all of the features are supported.

For the description of configuration items, we have to declare a meaning of the following symbols:

INT – Integer
STR – Textual string
HEXSTR – Hexadecimal string (with 0x prefix)
BOOL – Boolean value (on/off or true/false)
TIME – Number of seconds, an integer with possible time multiplier suffix (s ~ 1, m ~ 60, h ~ 3600 or d ~ 24 * 3600)
SIZE – Number of bytes, an integer with possible size multiplier suffix (B ~ 1, K ~ 1024, M ~ 1024^2 or G ~ 1024^3)
BASE64 – Base64 encoded string
ADDR – IPv4 or IPv6 address
DNAME – Domain name
… – Multi-valued item, order of the values is preserved
[ ] – Optional value
| – Choice

There are 12 main sections (module, server, control, log, statistics, keystore, policy, key, acl, remote, template, and zone) and module sections with the mod- prefix. Most of the sections (excluding server, control, and statistics) are sequences of settings blocks. Each settings block begins with a unique identifier, which can be used as a reference from other sections (such identifier must be defined in advance).

A multi-valued item can be specified either as a YAML sequence:

address: [10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2]

or as more single-valued items each on an extra line:

address: 10.0.0.1
address: 10.0.0.2

If an item value contains spaces or other special characters, it is necessary to enclose such value within double quotes " ".

Comments¶

A comment begins with a # character and is ignored during processing. Also each configuration section or sequence block allows a permanent comment using the comment item which is stored in the server beside the configuration.

Includes¶

Another configuration file or files, matching a pattern, can be included at the top level in the current file. If the path is not absolute, then it is considered to be relative to the current file. The pattern can be an arbitrary string meeting POSIX glob requirements, e.g. dir/*.conf. Matching files are processed in sorted order.

include: STR

Module section¶

Dynamic modules loading configuration.

Note

If configured with non-empty `--with-moduledir=path` parameter, all shared modules in this directory will be automatically loaded.

module:
  - id: STR
    file: STR

id¶

A module identifier in the form of the mod- prefix and module name suffix.

file¶

A path to a shared library file with the module implementation.

Warning

If the path is not absolute, the library is searched in the set of system directories. See man dlopen for more details.

Default: ${libdir}/knot/modules-${version}/module_name.so (or ${path}/module_name.so if configured with --with-moduledir=path)

Server section¶

General options related to the server.

server:
    identity: [STR]
    version: [STR]
    nsid: [STR|HEXSTR]
    rundir: STR
    user: STR[:STR]
    pidfile: STR
    udp-workers: INT
    tcp-workers: INT
    background-workers: INT
    async-start: BOOL
    tcp-handshake-timeout: TIME
    tcp-idle-timeout: TIME
    tcp-reply-timeout: TIME
    max-tcp-clients: INT
    max-udp-payload: SIZE
    max-ipv4-udp-payload: SIZE
    max-ipv6-udp-payload: SIZE
    edns-client-subnet: BOOL
    answer-rotation: BOOL
    listen: ADDR[@INT] ...

identity¶

An identity of the server returned in the response to the query for TXT record id.server. or hostname.bind. in the CHAOS class (RFC 4892). Set empty value to disable.

Default: FQDN hostname

version¶

A version of the server software returned in the response to the query for TXT record version.server. or version.bind. in the CHAOS class (RFC 4892). Set empty value to disable.

Default: server version

nsid¶

A DNS name server identifier (RFC 5001). Set empty value to disable.

Default: FQDN hostname

rundir¶

A path for storing run-time data (PID file, unix sockets, etc.).

Default: ${localstatedir}/run/knot (configured with --with-rundir=path)

user¶

A system user with an optional system group (user:group) under which the server is run after starting and binding to interfaces. Linux capabilities are employed if supported.

Default: root:root

pidfile¶

A PID file location.

Default: rundir/knot.pid

udp-workers¶

A number of UDP workers (threads) used to process incoming queries over UDP.

Default: auto-estimated optimal value based on the number of online CPUs

tcp-workers¶

A number of TCP workers (threads) used to process incoming queries over TCP.

Default: auto-estimated optimal value based on the number of online CPUs

background-workers¶

A number of workers (threads) used to execute background operations (zone loading, zone updates, etc.).

Default: auto-estimated optimal value based on the number of online CPUs

async-start¶

If enabled, server doesn’t wait for the zones to be loaded and starts responding immediately with SERVFAIL answers until the zone loads.

Default: off

tcp-handshake-timeout¶

Maximum time between newly accepted TCP connection and the first query. This is useful to disconnect inactive connections faster than connections that already made at least 1 meaningful query.

Default: 5

tcp-idle-timeout¶

Maximum idle time between requests on a TCP connection. This also limits receiving of a single query, each query must be received in this time limit.

Default: 20

tcp-reply-timeout¶

Maximum time to wait for an outgoing connection or for a reply to an issued request (SOA, NOTIFY, AXFR…).

Default: 10

max-tcp-clients¶

A maximum number of TCP clients connected in parallel, set this below the file descriptor limit to avoid resource exhaustion.

Default: 100

max-udp-payload¶

Maximum EDNS0 UDP payload size default for both IPv4 and IPv6.

Default: 4096

max-ipv4-udp-payload¶

Maximum EDNS0 UDP payload size for IPv4.

Default: 4096

max-ipv6-udp-payload¶

Maximum EDNS0 UDP payload size for IPv6.

Default: 4096

edns-client-subnet¶

Enable or disable EDNS Client Subnet support. If enabled, responses to queries containing the EDNS Client Subnet option always contain a valid EDNS Client Subnet option according to RFC 7871.

Default: off

answer-rotation¶

Enable or disable sorted-rrset rotation in the answer section of normal replies. The rotation shift is simply determined by a query ID.

Default: off

listen¶

One or more IP addresses where the server listens for incoming queries. Optional port specification (default is 53) can be appended to each address using @ separator. Use 0.0.0.0 for all configured IPv4 addresses or :: for all configured IPv6 addresses. Non-local address binding is automatically enabled if supported by the operating system.

Default: not set

Key section¶

Shared TSIG keys used to authenticate communication with the server.

key:
  - id: DNAME
    algorithm: hmac-md5 | hmac-sha1 | hmac-sha224 | hmac-sha256 | hmac-sha384 | hmac-sha512
    secret: BASE64

id¶

A key name identifier.

Note

This value MUST be exactly the same as the name of the TSIG key on the opposite master/slave server(s).

algorithm¶

A TSIG key algorithm. See TSIG Algorithm Numbers.

Possible values:

hmac-md5
hmac-sha1
hmac-sha224
hmac-sha256
hmac-sha384
hmac-sha512

Default: not set

secret¶

Shared key secret.

Default: not set

ACL section¶

Access control list rule definitions. The ACLs are used to match incoming connections to allow or deny requested operation (zone transfer request, DDNS update, etc.).

acl:
  - id: STR
    address: ADDR[/INT] | ADDR-ADDR ...
    key: key_id ...
    action: notify | transfer | update ...
    deny: BOOL
    update-type: STR ...
    update-owner: key | zone | name
    update-owner-match: sub-or-equal | equal | sub
    update-owner-name: STR ...

id¶

An ACL rule identifier.

address¶

An ordered list of IP addresses, network subnets, or network ranges. The query must match one of them. Empty value means that address match is not required.

Default: not set

key¶

An ordered list of references to TSIG keys. The query must match one of them. Empty value means that transaction authentication is not used.

Default: not set

action¶

An ordered list of allowed (or denied) actions.

Possible values:

notify – Allow incoming notify.
transfer – Allow zone transfer.
update – Allow zone updates.

Default: not set

deny¶

If enabled, instead of allowing, deny the specified action, address, key, or combination if these items. If no action is specified, deny all actions.

Default: off

update-type¶

A list of allowed types of Resource Records in a zone update. Every record in an update must match one of the specified types.

Default: not set

update-owner¶

This option restricts possible owners of Resource Records in a zone update by comparing them to either the TSIG key identity, the current zone name, or to a list of domain names given by the update-owner-name option. The comparison method is given by the update-owner-match option.

Possible values:

key — The owner of each updated RR must match the identity of the TSIG key if used.
name — The owner of each updated RR must match at least one name in the update-owner-name list.
zone — The owner of each updated RR must match the current zone name.

Default: not set

update-owner-match¶

This option defines how the owners of Resource Records in an update are matched to the domain name(s) set by the update-owner option.

Possible values:

sub-or-equal — The owner of each Resource Record in an update must either be equal to or be a subdomain of at least one domain set by update-owner.
equal — The owner of each updated RR must be equal to at least one domain set by update-owner.
sub — The owner of each updated RR must be a subdomain of, but MUST NOT be equal to at least one domain set by update-owner.

Default: sub-or-equal

update-owner-name¶

A list of allowed owners of RRs in a zone update used with update-owner set to name.

Default: not set

Control section¶

Configuration of the server control interface.

control:
    listen: STR
    timeout: TIME

listen¶

A UNIX socket path where the server listens for control commands.

Default: rundir/knot.sock

timeout¶

Maximum time the control socket operations can take. Set 0 for infinity.

Default: 5

Statistics section¶

Periodic server statistics dumping.

statistics:
    timer: TIME
    file: STR
    append: BOOL

timer¶

A period after which all available statistics metrics will by written to the file.

Default: not set

file¶

A file path of statistics output in the YAML format.

Default: rundir/stats.yaml

append¶

If enabled, the output will be appended to the file instead of file replacement.

Default: off

Keystore section¶

DNSSEC keystore configuration.

keystore:
  - id: STR
    backend: pem | pkcs11
    config: STR

id¶

A keystore identifier.

backend¶

A key storage backend type.

Possible values:

pem – PEM files.
pkcs11 – PKCS #11 storage.

Default: pem

config¶

A backend specific configuration. A directory with PEM files (the path can be specified as a relative path to kasp-db) or a configuration string for PKCS #11 storage (<pkcs11-url> <module-path>).

Note

Example configuration string for PKCS #11:

"pkcs11:token=knot;pin-value=1234 /usr/lib64/pkcs11/libsofthsm2.so"

Default: kasp-db/keys

Submission section¶

Parameters of KSK submission checks.

submission:
  - id: STR
    parent: remote_id ...
    check-interval: TIME
    timeout: TIME

id¶

A submission identifier.

parent¶

A list of references to parent’s DNS servers to be checked for presence of corresponding DS records in the case of KSK submission. All of them must have a corresponding DS for the rollover to continue. If none is specified, the rollover must be pushed forward manually.

Default: not set

Tip

A DNSSEC-validating resolver can be set as a parent.

check-interval¶

Interval for periodic checks of DS presence on parent’s DNS servers, in the case of the KSK submission.

Default: 1 hour

timeout¶

After this period, the KSK submission is automatically considered successful, even if all the checks were negative or no parents are configured. Set 0 for infinity.

Default: 0

Policy section¶

DNSSEC policy configuration.

policy:
  - id: STR
    keystore: STR
    manual: BOOL
    single-type-signing: BOOL
    algorithm: rsasha1 | rsasha1-nsec3-sha1 | rsasha256 | rsasha512 | ecdsap256sha256 | ecdsap384sha384 | ed25519
    ksk-size: SIZE
    zsk-size: SIZE
    ksk-shared: BOOL
    dnskey-ttl: TIME
    zone-max-ttl: TIME
    zsk-lifetime: TIME
    ksk-lifetime: TIME
    propagation-delay: TIME
    rrsig-lifetime: TIME
    rrsig-refresh: TIME
    nsec3: BOOL
    nsec3-iterations: INT
    nsec3-opt-out: BOOL
    nsec3-salt-length: INT
    nsec3-salt-lifetime: TIME
    signing-threads: INT
    ksk-submission: submission_id
    ds-push: remote_id
    cds-cdnskey-publish: none | delete-dnssec | rollover | always | double-ds
    offline-ksk: BOOL

id¶

A policy identifier.

keystore¶

A reference to a keystore holding private key material for zones. A special default value can be used for the default keystore settings.

Default: default

manual¶

If enabled, automatic key management is not used.

Default: off

single-type-signing¶

If enabled, Single-Type Signing Scheme is used in the automatic key management mode.

Default: off

algorithm¶

An algorithm of signing keys and issued signatures. See DNSSEC Algorithm Numbers.

Possible values:

rsasha1
rsasha1-nsec3-sha1
rsasha256
rsasha512
ecdsap256sha256
ecdsap384sha384
ed25519

Note

Ed25519 algorithm is only available when compiled with GnuTLS 3.6.0+.

Default: ecdsap256sha256

ksk-size¶

A length of newly generated KSK or CSK keys.

Default: 2048 (rsa*), 256 (ecdsap256), 384 (ecdsap384), 256 (ed25519)

zsk-size¶

A length of newly generated ZSK keys.

Default: see default for ksk-size

ksk-shared¶

If enabled, all zones with this policy assigned will share one KSK.

Default: off

dnskey-ttl¶

A TTL value for DNSKEY records added into zone apex.

Note

Has infuence over ZSK key lifetime.

Warning

Ensure all DNSKEYs with updated TTL are propagated before any subsequent DNSKEY rollover starts.

Default: zone SOA TTL

zone-max-ttl¶

Declare (override) maximal TTL value among all the records in zone.

Note

It’s generally recommended to override the maximal TTL computation by setting this explicitly whenever possible. It’s required for DNSSEC Offline KSK and really reasonable when records are generated dynamically (e.g. by a module).

Default: computed after zone is loaded

zsk-lifetime¶

A period between ZSK activation and the next rollover initiation.

Note

More exactly, this period is measured since a ZSK is activated, and after this, a new ZSK is generated to replace it within following roll-over.

ZSK key lifetime is also infuenced by propagation-delay and dnskey-ttl

Zero (aka infinity) value causes no ZSK rollover as a result.

Default: 30 days

ksk-lifetime¶

A period between KSK activation and the next rollover initiation.

Note

KSK key lifetime is also infuenced by propagation-delay, dnskey-ttl, and KSK submission delay.

Zero (aka infinity) value causes no KSK rollover as a result.

This applies for CSK lifetime if single-type-signing is enabled.

Default: 0

propagation-delay¶

An extra delay added for each key rollover step. This value should be high enough to cover propagation of data from the master server to all slaves.

Note

Has infuence over ZSK key lifetime.

Default: 1 hour

rrsig-lifetime¶

A validity period of newly issued signatures.

Note

The RRSIG’s signature inception time is set to 90 minutes in the past. This time period is not counted to the signature lifetime.

Default: 14 days

rrsig-refresh¶

A period how long before a signature expiration the signature will be refreshed.

Default: 7 days

nsec3¶

Specifies if NSEC3 will be used instead of NSEC.

Default: off

nsec3-iterations¶

A number of additional times the hashing is performed.

Default: 5

nsec3-opt-out¶

If set, NSEC3 records won’t be created for insecure delegations. This speeds up the zone signing and reduces overall zone size.

Warning

NSEC3 with the Opt-Out bit set no longer works as a proof of non-existence in this zone.

Default: off

nsec3-salt-length¶

A length of a salt field in octets, which is appended to the original owner name before hashing.

Default: 8

nsec3-salt-lifetime¶

A validity period of newly issued salt field.

Zero value means infinity.

Default: 30 days

ksk-submission¶

A reference to submission section holding parameters of KSK submission checks.

Default: not set

ds-push¶

An optional reference to authoritative DNS server of the parent’s zone. The remote server must be configured to accept DS record updates via DDNS. Whenever a CDS record in the local zone is changed, the corresponding DS record is sent as a dynamic update (DDNS) to the parent DNS server. All previous DS records are deleted within the DDNS message. It’s possible to manage both child and parent zones by the same Knot DNS server.

Note

This feature requires cds-cdnskey-publish not to be set to none.

Note

Module Onlinesign doesn’t support DS push.

Default: not set

signing-threads¶

When signing zone or update, use this number of threads for parallel signing.

Those are extra threads independent of Background workers.

Note

Some steps of the DNSSEC signing operation are not parallelized.

Default: 1 (no extra threads)

cds-cdnskey-publish¶

Controls if and how shall the CDS and CDNSKEY be published in the zone.

Possible values:

none – Never publish any CDS or CDNSKEY records in the zone.
delete-dnssec – Publish special CDS and CDNSKEY records indicating turning off DNSSEC.
rollover – Publish CDS and CDNSKEY records only in the submission phase of KSK rollover.
always – Always publish one CDS and one CDNSKEY records for the current KSK.
double-ds – Always publish up to two CDS and two CDNSKEY records for ready and/or active KSKs.

Note

If the zone keys are managed manually, the CDS and CDNSKEY rrsets may contain more records depending on the keys available.

Default: rollover

offline-ksk¶

Specifies if Offline KSK feature is enabled.

Default: off

Remote section¶

Definitions of remote servers for outgoing connections (source of a zone transfer, target for a notification, etc.).

remote:
  - id: STR
    address: ADDR[@INT] ...
    via: ADDR[@INT] ...
    key: key_id

id¶

A remote identifier.

address¶

An ordered list of destination IP addresses which are used for communication with the remote server. The addresses are tried in sequence until the remote is reached. Optional destination port (default is 53) can be appended to the address using @ separator.

Default: not set

Note

If the remote is contacted and it refuses to perform requested action, no more addresses will be tried for this remote.

via¶

An ordered list of source IP addresses. The first address with the same family as the destination address is used. Optional source port (default is random) can be appended to the address using @ separator.

Default: not set

key¶

A reference to the TSIG key which is used to authenticate the communication with the remote server.

Default: not set

Template section¶

A template is a shareable zone setting which can be used for configuration of many zones in one place. A special default template (with the default identifier) can be used for global querying configuration or as an implicit configuration if a zone doesn’t have another template specified.

template:
  - id: STR
    timer-db: STR
    max-timer-db-size: SIZE
    journal-db: STR
    journal-db-mode: robust | asynchronous
    max-journal-db-size: SIZE
    kasp-db: STR
    max-kasp-db-size: SIZE
    global-module: STR/STR ...
    # All zone options (excluding 'template' item)

id¶

A template identifier.

timer-db¶

Specifies a path of the persistent timer database. The path can be specified as a relative path to the default template storage.

Note

This option is only available in the default template.

Default: storage/timers

max-timer-db-size¶

Hard limit for the timer database maximum size.

Note

This option is only available in the default template.

Default: 100 MiB

journal-db¶

Specifies a path of the persistent journal database. The path can be specified as a relative path to the default template storage.

Note

This option is only available in the default template.

Default: storage/journal

journal-db-mode¶

Specifies journal LMDB backend configuration, which influences performance and durability.

Possible values:

robust – The journal DB disk sychronization ensures DB durability but is generally slower.
asynchronous – The journal DB disk synchronization is optimized for better performance at the expense of lower DB durability; this mode is recommended only on slave nodes with many zones.

Note

This option is only available in the default template.

Default: robust

max-journal-db-size¶

Hard limit for the common journal DB. There is no cleanup logic in journal to recover from reaching this limit: journal simply starts refusing changes across all zones. Decreasing this value has no effect if lower than actual DB file size.

It is recommended to limit max-journal-usage per-zone instead of max-journal-db-size in most cases. Please keep this value larger than the sum of all zones’ journal usage limits. See more details regarding journal behaviour.

This value also influences server’s usage of virtual memory.

Note

This option is only available in the default template.

Default: 20 GiB (1 GiB for 32-bit)

kasp-db¶

A KASP database path. Non-absolute path is relative to storage.

Note

This option is only available in the default template.

Default: storage/keys

max-kasp-db-size¶

Hard limit for the KASP database maximum size.

Note

This option is only available in the default template.

Default: 500 MiB

global-module¶

An ordered list of references to query modules in the form of module_name or module_name/module_id. These modules apply to all queries.

Note

This option is only available in the default template.

Default: not set

Zone section¶

Definition of zones served by the server.

zone:
  - domain: DNAME
    template: template_id
    storage: STR
    file: STR
    master: remote_id ...
    ddns-master: remote_id
    notify: remote_id ...
    acl: acl_id ...
    semantic-checks: BOOL
    disable-any: BOOL
    zonefile-sync: TIME
    zonefile-load: none | difference | difference-no-serial | whole
    journal-content: none | changes | all
    max-journal-usage: SIZE
    max-journal-depth: INT
    max-zone-size : SIZE
    dnssec-signing: BOOL
    dnssec-policy: STR
    request-edns-option: INT:[HEXSTR]
    serial-policy: increment | unixtime | dateserial
    min-refresh-interval: TIME
    max-refresh-interval: TIME
    module: STR/STR ...

domain¶

A zone name identifier.

template¶

A reference to a configuration template.

Default: not set or default (if the template exists)

storage¶

A data directory for storing zone files, journal database, and timers database.

Default: ${localstatedir}/lib/knot (configured with --with-storage=path)

file¶

A path to the zone file. Non-absolute path is relative to storage. It is also possible to use the following formatters:

%c[N] or %c[N-M] – Means the Nth character or a sequence of characters beginning from the Nth and ending with the Mth character of the textual zone name (see %s). The indexes are counted from 0 from the left. All dots (including the terminal one) are considered. If the character is not available, the formatter has no effect.
%l[N] – Means the Nth label of the textual zone name (see %s). The index is counted from 0 from the right (0 ~ TLD). If the label is not available, the formatter has no effect.
%s – Means the current zone name in the textual representation. The zone name doesn’t include the terminating dot (the result for the root zone is the empty string!).
%% – Means the % character.

Warning

Beware of special characters which are escaped or encoded in the \DDD form where DDD is corresponding decimal ASCII code.

Default: storage/%s.zone

master¶

An ordered list of references to zone master servers.

Default: not set

ddns-master¶

A reference to zone primary master server. If not specified, the first master server is used.

Default: not set

notify¶

An ordered list of references to remotes to which notify message is sent if the zone changes.

Default: not set

acl¶

An ordered list of references to ACL rules which can allow or disallow zone transfers, updates or incoming notifies.

Default: not set

semantic-checks¶

If enabled, extra zone semantic checks are turned on.

Several checks are enabled by default and cannot be turned off. An error in mandatory checks causes zone not to be loaded. An error in extra checks is logged only.

Mandatory checks:

SOA record missing in the zone (RFC 1034)
An extra record together with CNAME record except for RRSIG and DS (RFC 1034)
Multiple CNAME record with the same owner
DNAME record having a record under it (RFC 2672)

Extra checks:

Missing NS record at the zone apex
Missing glue A or AAAA record
Invalid DNSKEY, DS, or NSEC3PARAM record
CDS or CDNSKEY inconsistency
Missing, invalid, or unverifiable RRSIG record
Invalid NSEC(3) record
Broken or non-cyclic NSEC(3) chain

Default: off

disable-any¶

If enabled, all authoritative ANY queries sent over UDP will be answered with an empty response and with the TC bit set. Use this option to minimize the risk of DNS reflection attack.

Default: off

zonefile-sync¶

The time after which the current zone in memory will be synced with a zone file on the disk (see file). The server will serve the latest zone even after a restart using zone journal, but the zone file on the disk will only be synced after zonefile-sync time has expired (or after manual zone flush). This is applicable when the zone is updated via IXFR, DDNS or automatic DNSSEC signing. In order to completely disable automatic zone file synchronization, set the value to -1. In that case, it is still possible to force a manual zone flush using the -f option.

Note

If you are serving large zones with frequent updates where the immediate sync with a zone file is not desirable, increase the value.

Default: 0 (immediate)

zonefile-load¶

Selects how the zone file contents are applied during zone load.

Possible values:

none – The zone file is not used at all.
difference – If the zone contents are already available during server start or reload, the difference is computed between them and the contents of the zone file. This difference is then checked for semantic errors and applied to the current zone contents.
difference-no-serial – Same as difference, but the SOA serial in the zone file is ignored, the server takes care of incrementing the serial automatically.
whole – Zone contents are loaded from the zone file.

When difference is configured and there are no zone contents yet (cold start of Knot and no zone contents in journal), it behaves the same way like whole.

Default: whole

journal-content¶

Selects how the journal shall be used to store zone and its changes.

Possible values:

none – The journal is not used at all.
changes – Zone changes history is stored in journal.
all – Zone contents and history is stored in journal.

Default: changes

max-journal-usage¶

Policy how much space in journal DB will the zone’s journal occupy.

Note

Journal DB may grow far above the sum of max-journal-usage across all zones, because of DB free space fragmentation.

Default: 100 MiB

max-journal-depth¶

Maximum history length of journal.

Minimum: 2

Default: 2^64

max-zone-size¶

Maximum size of the zone. The size is measured as size of the zone records in wire format without compression. The limit is enforced for incoming zone transfers and dynamic updates.

For incremental transfers (IXFR), the effective limit for the total size of the records in the transfer is twice the configured value. However the final size of the zone must satisfy the configured value.

Default: 2^64

dnssec-signing¶

If enabled, automatic DNSSEC signing for the zone is turned on.

Default: off

dnssec-policy¶

A reference to DNSSEC signing policy. A special default value can be used for the default policy settings.

Required

request-edns-option¶

An arbitrary EDNS0 option which is included into a server request (AXFR, IXFR, SOA, or NOTIFY). The value is in the option_code:option_data format.

Default: not set

serial-policy¶

Specifies how the zone serial is updated after a dynamic update or automatic DNSSEC signing. If the serial is changed by the dynamic update, no change is made.

Possible values:

increment – The serial is incremented according to serial number arithmetic.
unixtime – The serial is set to the current unix time.
dateserial – The 10-digit serial (YYYYMMDDnn) is incremented, the first 8 digits match the current iso-date.

Note

In case of unixtime, if the resulting serial is lower or equal than current zone (this happens e.g. in case of migrating from other policy or frequent updates) the serial is incremented instead.

Use dateserial only if you expect less than 100 updates per day per zone.

Default: increment

min-refresh-interval¶

Forced minimum zone refresh interval to avoid flooding master.

Default: 2

max-refresh-interval¶

Forced maximum zone refresh interval.

Default: not set

module¶

An ordered list of references to query modules in the form of module_name or module_name/module_id. These modules apply only to the current zone queries.

Default: not set

Logging section¶

Server can be configured to log to the standard output, standard error output, syslog (or systemd journal if systemd is enabled) or into an arbitrary file.

There are 6 logging severity levels:

critical – Non-recoverable error resulting in server shutdown.
error – Recoverable error, action should be taken.
warning – Warning that might require user action.
notice – Server notice or hint.
info – Informational message.
debug – Debug or detailed message.

In the case of missing log section, warning or more serious messages will be logged to both standard error output and syslog. The info and notice messages will be logged to standard output.

log:
  - target: stdout | stderr | syslog | STR
    server: critical | error | warning | notice | info | debug
    control: critical | error | warning | notice | info | debug
    zone: critical | error | warning | notice | info | debug
    any: critical | error | warning | notice | info | debug

target¶

A logging output.

Possible values:

stdout – Standard output.
stderr – Standard error output.
syslog – Syslog or systemd journal.
file_name – A specific file.

With syslog target, syslog service is used. However, if Knot DNS has been compiled with systemd support and operating system has been booted with systemd, systemd journal is used for logging instead of syslog.

server¶

Minimum severity level for messages related to general operation of the server to be logged.

Default: not set

control¶

Minimum severity level for messages related to server control to be logged.

Default: not set

zone¶

Minimum severity level for messages related to zones to be logged.

Default: not set

any¶

Minimum severity level for all message types to be logged.

Default: not set

Modules¶

`cookies` — DNS Cookies¶

DNS Cookies (RFC 7873) is a lightweight security mechanism against denial-of-service and amplification attacks. The server keeps a secret value (the Server Secret), which is used to generate a cookie, which is sent to the client in the OPT RR. The server then verifies the authenticity of the client by the presence of a correct cookie. Both the server and the client have to support DNS Cookies, otherwise they are not used.

Note

This module introduces a statistics counter: the number of queries containing the COOKIE option.

Warning

For effective module operation the RRL module must also be enabled and configured after Cookies. See Query modules how to configure modules.

Example¶

It is recommended to enable DNS Cookies globally, not per zone. The module may be used without any further configuration.

template:
    - id: default
      global-module: mod-cookies # Enable DNS Cookies globally

Module configuration may be supplied if necessary.

mod-cookies:
  - id: default
    secret-lifetime: 30h # The Server Secret is regenerated every 30 hours
    badcookie-slip: 3    # The server replies only to every third query with a wrong cookie

template:
  - id: default
    global-module: mod-cookies/default # Enable DNS Cookies globally

The value of the Server Secret may also be managed manually using the secret option. In this case the server does not automatically regenerate the Server Secret.

mod-cookies:
    - id: default
      secret: 0xdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeef

Module reference¶

mod-cookies:
  - id: STR
    secret-lifetime: TIME
    badcookie-slip: INT
    secret: STR|HEXSTR

id¶

A module identifier.

secret-lifetime¶

This option configures how often the Server Secret is regenerated. The maximum allowed value is 36 days (RFC 7873#section-7.1).

Default: 26 hours

badcookie-slip¶

This option configures how often the server responds to queries containing an invalid cookie by sending them the correct cookie.

The value 1 means that the server responds to every query.
The value 2 means that the server responds to every second query with an invalid cookie, the rest of the queries is dropped.
The value N > 2 means that the server responds to every N^th query with an invalid cookie, the rest of the queries is dropped.

Default: 1

secret¶

Use this option to set the Server Secret manually. If this option is used, the Server Secret remains the same until changed manually and the secret-lifetime option is ignored. The size of the Server Secret currently MUST BE 16 bytes, or 32 hexadecimal characters.

Default: not set

`dnsproxy` – Tiny DNS proxy¶

The module forwards all queries, or all specific zone queries if configured per zone, to the indicated server for resolution. If configured in the fallback mode, only localy unsatisfied queries are forwarded. I.e. a tiny DNS proxy. There are several uses of this feature:

A substitute public-facing server in front of the real one
Local zones (poor man’s “views”), rest is forwarded to the public-facing server
Using the fallback to forward queries to a resolver
etc.

Note

The module does not alter the query/response as the resolver would, and the original transport protocol is kept as well.

Example¶

The configuration is straightforward and just a single remote server is required:

remote:
  - id: hidden
    address: 10.0.1.1

mod-dnsproxy:
  - id: default
    remote: hidden
    fallback: on

template:
  - id: default
    global-module: mod-dnsproxy/default

zone:
  - domain: local.zone

When clients query for anything in the local.zone, they will be responded to locally. The rest of the requests will be forwarded to the specified server (10.0.1.1 in this case).

Module reference¶

mod-dnsproxy:
  - id: STR
    remote: remote_id
    timeout: INT
    fallback: BOOL
    catch-nxdomain: BOOL

id¶

A module identifier.

remote¶

A reference to a remote server where the queries are forwarded to.

Required

timeout¶

A remote response timeout in milliseconds.

Default: 500

fallback¶

If enabled, localy unsatisfied queries leading to REFUSED (no zone) are forwarded. If disabled, all queries are directly forwarded without any local attempts to resolve them.

Default: on

catch-nxdomain¶

If enabled, localy unsatisfied queries leading to NXDOMAIN are forwarded. This option is only relevant in the fallback mode.

Default: off

`dnstap` – Dnstap traffic logging¶

A module for query and response logging based on the dnstap library. You can capture either all or zone-specific queries and responses; usually you want to do the former.

Example¶

The configuration comprises only a sink path parameter, which can be either a file or a UNIX socket:

mod-dnstap:
  - id: capture_all
    sink: /tmp/capture.tap

template:
  - id: default
    global-module: mod-dnstap/capture_all

Note

To be able to use a Unix socket you need an external program to create it. Knot DNS connects to it as a client using the libfstrm library. It operates exactly like syslog. See here for more details.

Note

Dnstap log files can also be created or read using kdig.

Module reference¶

For all queries logging, use this module in the default template. For zone-specific logging, use this module in the proper zone configuration.

mod-dnstap:
  - id: STR
    sink: STR
    identity: STR
    version: STR
    log-queries: BOOL
    log-responses: BOOL

id¶

A module identifier.

sink¶

A sink path, which can be either a file or a UNIX socket when prefixed with unix:.

Required

Warning

File is overwritten on server startup or reload.

identity¶

A DNS server identity. Set empty value to disable.

Default: FQDN hostname

version¶

A DNS server version. Set empty value to disable.

Default: server version

log-queries¶

If enabled, query messages will be logged.

Default: on

log-responses¶

If enabled, response messages will be logged.

Default: on

`geoip` — Geography-based responses¶

This module offers response tailoring based on client’s subnet, geographic location, or a statistical weight. It supports GeoIP databases in the MaxMind DB format, such as GeoIP2 or the free version GeoLite2.

The module can be enabled only per zone.

Note

If EDNS Client Subnet support is enabled and if a query contains this option, the module takes advantage of this information to provide a more accurate response.

DNSSEC support¶

There are two ways to enable DNSSEC signing of tailored responses. If automatic DNSSEC signing is enabled, record signatures are precomputed when the module is loaded. This has a speed benefit, however note that every RRset configured in the module should have a default RRset of the same type contained in the zone, so that the NSEC(3) chain can be built correctly. Also, it is STRONGLY RECOMMENDED to use manual key management in this setting, as the corresponding zone has to be reloaded when the signing key changes and to have better control over key synchronization to all instances of the server.

Note

If the GeoIP module is used with automatic DNSSEC signing, the keys for computing record signatures MUST exist or be generated before the server is launched, otherwise the module fails to compute the signatures and does not load.

Alternatively, the geoip module may be combined with the onlinesign module and the tailored responses can be signed on the fly. This approach is much more computationally demanding for the server.

Note

If the GeoIP module is used with online signing, it is recommended to set the nsec-bitmap option of the onlinesign module to contain all Resource Record types potentially generated by the module.

Example¶

An example configuration.:

mod-geoip:
  - id: default
    config-file: /path/to/geo.conf
    ttl: 20
    mode: geodb
    geodb-file: /path/to/GeoLite2-City.mmdb
    geodb-key: [ country/iso_code, city/names/en ]

zone:
  - domain: example.com.
    module: mod-geoip/default

Configuration file¶

Every instance of the module requires an additional config-file in which the desired responses to queries from various locations are configured. This file has the following simple format:

domain-name1:
  - geo|net|weight: value1
    RR-Type1: RDATA
    RR-Type2: RDATA
    ...
  - geo|net|weight: value2
    RR-Type1: RDATA
  ...
domain-name2:
...

Module configuration examples¶

This section contains some examples for the module’s config-file.

Using subnets¶

foo.example.com:
  - net: 10.0.0.0/24
    A: [ 192.168.1.1, 192.168.1.2 ]
    AAAA: [ 2001:DB8::1, 2001:DB8::2 ]
    TXT: "subnet\ 10.0.0.0/24"
  ...
bar.example.com:
  - net: 2001:DB8::/32
    A: 192.168.1.3
    AAAA: 2001:DB8::3
    TXT: "subnet\ 2001:DB8::/32"
...

Clients from the specified subnets will receive the responses defined in the module config. Others will receive the default records defined in the zone (if any).

Note

If a space or a quotation mark is a part of record data, such a character must be prefixed with a backslash. The following notations are equivalent:

Multi-word\ string
"Multi-word\ string"
"\"Multi-word string\""

Using geographic locations¶

foo.example.com:
  - geo: "CZ;Prague"
    CNAME: cz.foo.example.com.
  - geo: "US;Las Vegas"
    CNAME: vegas.foo.example.net.
  - geo: "US;*"
    CNAME: us.foo.example.net.
...

Clients from the specified geographic locations will receive the responses defined in the module config. Others will receive the default records defined in the zone (if any). See geodb-key for the syntax and semantics of the location definitions.

Using weighted records¶

foo.example.com:
  - weight: 1
    CNAME: canary.foo.example.com.
  - weight: 10
    CNAME: prod1.foo.example.com.
  - weight: 10
    CNAME: prod2.foo.example.com.
...

Each response is generated through a random pick where each defined record has a likelyhood of its weight over the sum of all weights for the requested name to. Records defined in the zone itself (if any) will never be served.

Result:

$ for i in $(seq 1 100); do kdig @192.168.1.242 CNAME foo.example.com +short; done | sort | uniq -c
canary.foo.example.com.foo.example.com.
prod1.foo.example.net.foo.example.com.
prod2.foo.example.net.foo.example.com.

Module reference¶

mod-geoip:
  - id: STR
    config-file: STR
    ttl: TIME
    mode: geodb | subnet | weighted
    geodb-file: STR
    geodb-key: STR ...

id¶

A module identifier.

config-file¶

Full path to the response configuration file as described above.

Required

ttl¶

The time to live of Resource Records returned by the module.

Default: 60

mode¶

The mode of operation of the module.

Possible values:

subnet – Responses are tailored according to subnets.
geodb – Responses are tailored according to geographic data retrieved from the configured database.
weighted – Responses are tailored according to a statistical weight.

Default: subnet

geodb-file¶

Full path to a .mmdb file containing the GeoIP database.

Reqired if mode is set to geodb

geodb-key¶

Multi-valued item, can be specified up to 8 times. Each geodb-key specifies a path to a key in a node in the supplied GeoIP database. The module currently supports two types of values: string or 32-bit unsigned int. In the latter case, the key has to be prefixed with (id). Common choices of keys include:

continent/code
country/iso_code
(id)country/geoname_id
city/names/en
(id)city/geoname_id
isp
…

The exact keys available depend on the database being used. To get the full list of keys available, you can e.g. do a sample lookup on your database with the mmdblookup tool.

In the zone’s config file for the module the values of the keys are entered in the same order as the keys in the module’s configuration, separated by a semicolon. Enter the value “*” if the key is allowed to have any value.

`noudp` — No UDP response¶

The module sends empty truncated response to a UDP query. TCP queries are not affected.

Example¶

To enable this module for all configured zones and every UDP query:

template:
  - id: default
    global-module: mod-noudp

Or with specified UDP allow rate:

mod-noudp:
  - id: sometimes
    udp-allow-rate: 1000  # Don't truncate every 1000th UDP query

template:
  - id: default
    module: mod-noudp/sometimes

Module reference¶

mod-noudp:
 - id: STR
   udp-allow-rate: INT

udp-allow-rate¶

Specifies how many UDP queries will pass the filter. Value 0 means none. A non-zero value means every N^th UDP query will pass the filter.

Note

The rate value is associated with one UDP worker. If more UDP workers are configured, the specified value may not be obvious to clients.

Default: 0

`onlinesign` — Online DNSSEC signing¶

The module provides online DNSSEC signing. Instead of pre-computing the zone signatures when the zone is loaded into the server or instead of loading an externally signed zone, the signatures are computed on-the-fly during answering.

The main purpose of the module is to enable authenticated responses with zones which use other dynamic module (e.g., automatic reverse record synthesis) because these zones cannot be pre-signed. However, it can be also used as a simple signing solution for zones with low traffic and also as a protection against zone content enumeration (zone walking).

In order to minimize the number of computed signatures per query, the module produces a bit different responses from the responses that would be sent if the zone was pre-signed. Still, the responses should be perfectly valid for a DNSSEC validating resolver.

Differences from statically signed zones:

The NSEC records are constructed as Minimally Covering NSEC Records (RFC 7129#appendix-A). Therefore the generated domain names cover the complete domain name space in the zone’s authority.
NXDOMAIN responses are promoted to NODATA responses. The module proves that the query type does not exist rather than that the domain name does not exist.
Domain names matching a wildcard are expanded. The module pretends and proves that the domain name exists rather than proving a presence of the wildcard.

Records synthesized by the module:

DNSKEY record is synthesized in the zone apex and includes public key material for the active signing key.
NSEC records are synthesized as needed.
RRSIG records are synthesized for authoritative content of the zone.
CDNSKEY and CDS records are generated as usual to publish valid Secure Entry Point.

Known issues:

The knotc zone-ksk-submitted command does not work well and is discouraged. The module must be reloaded afterwards.

Limitations:

Online-sign module always enforces Single-Type Signing scheme.
After any change to KASP DB, the module must be reloaded to apply the changed keys.
The NSEC records may differ for one domain name if queried for different types. This is an implementation shortcoming as the dynamic modules cooperate loosely. Possible synthesis of a type by other module cannot be predicted. This dissimilarity should not affect response validation, even with validators performing aggressive negative caching.

Recommendations:

Configure the module with an explicit signing policy which has the rrsig-lifetime value in the order of hours.

Example¶

Enable the module in the zone configuration with the default signing policy:

zone:
  - domain: example.com
    module: mod-onlinesign

Or with an explicit signing policy:

policy:
  - id: rsa
    algorithm: RSASHA256
    zsk-size: 2048
    rrsig-lifetime: 25h

mod-onlinesign:
  - id: explicit
    policy: rsa

zone:
  - domain: example.com
    module: mod-onlinesign/explicit

Or use manual policy in an analogous manner, see Manual key management.

Make sure the zone is not signed and also that the automatic signing is disabled. All is set, you are good to go. Reload (or start) the server:
```
$ knotc reload
```

The following example stacks the online signing with reverse record synthesis module:

mod-synthrecord:
  - id: lan-forward
    type: forward
    prefix: ip-
    ttl: 1200
    network: 192.168.100.0/24

zone:
  - domain: corp.example.net
    module: [mod-synthrecord/lan-forward, mod-onlinesign]

Module reference¶

mod-onlinesign:
  - id: STR
    policy: STR
    nsec-bitmap: STR ...

id¶

A module identifier.

policy¶

A reference to DNSSEC signing policy. A special default value can be used for the default policy setting.

nsec-bitmap¶

A list of Resource Record types included in an NSEC bitmap generated by the module. This option should reflect zone contents or synthesized responses by modules, such as synthrecord and GeoIP.

Default: [A, AAAA]

`queryacl` — Limit queries by remote address or target interface¶

This module provides a simple way to whitelist incoming queries according to the query’s source address or target interface. It can be used e.g. to create a restricted-access subzone with delegations from the corresponding public zone. The module may be enabled both globally and per-zone.

Note

The module limits only regular queries. Notify, transfer and update are handled by ACL.

Example¶

mod-queryacl:
  - id: default
    address: [192.0.2.73-192.0.2.90, 203.0.113.0/24]
    interface: 198.51.100

zone:
  - domain: example.com
    module: mod-queryacl/default

Module reference¶

mod-queryacl:
  - id: STR
    address: ADDR[/INT] | ADDR-ADDR ...
    interface: ADDR[/INT] | ADDR-ADDR ...

id¶

A module identifier.

address¶

A list of allowed ranges and/or subnets for query’s source address. If the query’s address does not fall into any of the configured ranges, NOTAUTH rcode is returned.

interface¶

A list of allowed ranges and/or subnets for query’s target interface. If the interface does not fall into any of the configured ranges, NOTAUTH rcode is returned. Note that every interface used has to be configured in listen.

`rrl` — Response rate limiting¶

Response rate limiting (RRL) is a method to combat DNS reflection amplification attacks. These attacks rely on the fact that source address of a UDP query can be forged, and without a worldwide deployment of BCP38, such a forgery cannot be prevented. An attacker can use a DNS server (or multiple servers) as an amplification source and can flood a victim with a large number of unsolicited DNS responses. The RRL lowers the amplification factor of these attacks by sending some of the responses as truncated or by dropping them altogether.

Note

The module introduces two statistics counters. The number of slipped and dropped responses.

Note

If the Cookies module is active, RRL is not applied for responses with a valid DNS cookie.

Example¶

You can enable RRL by setting the module globally or per zone.

mod-rrl:
  - id: default
    rate-limit: 200   # Allow 200 resp/s for each flow
    slip: 2           # Approximately every other response slips

template:
  - id: default
    global-module: mod-rrl/default   # Enable RRL globally

Module reference¶

mod-rrl:
  - id: STR
    rate-limit: INT
    slip: INT
    table-size: INT
    whitelist: ADDR[/INT] | ADDR-ADDR ...

id¶

A module identifier.

rate-limit¶

Rate limiting is based on the token bucket scheme. A rate basically represents a number of tokens available each second. Each response is processed and classified (based on several discriminators, e.g. source netblock, query type, zone name, rcode, etc.). Classified responses are then hashed and assigned to a bucket containing number of available tokens, timestamp and metadata. When available tokens are exhausted, response is dropped or sent as truncated (see slip). Number of available tokens is recalculated each second.

Required

table-size¶

Size of the hash table in a number of buckets. The larger the hash table, the lesser the probability of a hash collision, but at the expense of additional memory costs. Each bucket is estimated roughly to 32 bytes. The size should be selected as a reasonably large prime due to better hash function distribution properties. Hash table is internally chained and works well up to a fill rate of 90 %, general rule of thumb is to select a prime near 1.2 * maximum_qps.

Default: 393241

slip¶

As attacks using DNS/UDP are usually based on a forged source address, an attacker could deny services to the victim’s netblock if all responses would be completely blocked. The idea behind SLIP mechanism is to send each N^th response as truncated, thus allowing client to reconnect via TCP for at least some degree of service. It is worth noting, that some responses can’t be truncated (e.g. SERVFAIL).

Setting the value to 0 will cause that all rate-limited responses will be dropped. The outbound bandwidth and packet rate will be strictly capped by the rate-limit option. All legitimate requestors affected by the limit will face denial of service and will observe excessive timeouts. Therefore this setting is not recommended.
Setting the value to 1 will cause that all rate-limited responses will be sent as truncated. The amplification factor of the attack will be reduced, but the outbound data bandwidth won’t be lower than the incoming bandwidth. Also the outbound packet rate will be the same as without RRL.
Setting the value to 2 will cause that approximately half of the rate-limited responses will be dropped, the other half will be sent as truncated. With this configuration, both outbound bandwidth and packet rate will be lower than the inbound. On the other hand, the dropped responses enlarge the time window for possible cache poisoning attack on the resolver.
Setting the value to anything larger than 2 will keep on decreasing the outgoing rate-limited bandwidth, packet rate, and chances to notify legitimate requestors to reconnect using TCP. These attributes are inversely proportional to the configured value. Setting the value high is not advisable.

Default: 1

whitelist¶

A list of IP addresses, network subnets, or network ranges to exempt from rate limiting. Empty list means that no incoming connection will be white-listed.

Default: not set

`stats` — Query statistics¶

The module extends server statistics with incoming DNS request and corresponding response counters, such as used network protocol, total number of responded bytes, etc (see module reference for full list of supported counters). This module should be configured as the last module.

Note

Server initiated communication (outgoing NOTIFY, incoming *XFR,…) is not counted by this module.

Note

Leading 16-bit message size over TCP is not considered.

Example¶

Common statistics with default module configuration:

template:
  - id: default
    global-module: mod-stats

Per zone statistics with explicit module configuration:

mod-stats:
  - id: custom
    edns-presence: on
    query-type: on

template:
  - id: default
    module: mod-stats/custom

Module reference¶

mod-stats:
  - id: STR
    request-protocol: BOOL
    server-operation: BOOL
    request-bytes: BOOL
    response-bytes: BOOL
    edns-presence: BOOL
    flag-presence: BOOL
    response-code: BOOL
    request-edns-option: BOOL
    response-edns-option: BOOL
    reply-nodata: BOOL
    query-type: BOOL
    query-size: BOOL
    reply-size: BOOL

id¶

A module identifier.

request-protocol¶

If enabled, all incoming requests are counted by the network protocol:

udp4 - UDP over IPv4
tcp4 - TCP over IPv4
udp6 - UDP over IPv6
tcp6 - TCP over IPv6

Default: on

server-operation¶

If enabled, all incoming requests are counted by the server operation. The server operation is based on message header OpCode and message query (meta) type:

query - Normal query operation
update - Dynamic update operation
notify - NOTIFY request operation
axfr - Full zone transfer operation
ixfr - Incremental zone transfer operation
invalid - Invalid server operation

Default: on

request-bytes¶

If enabled, all incoming request bytes are counted by the server operation:

query - Normal query bytes
update - Dynamic update bytes
other - Other request bytes

Default: on

response-bytes¶

If enabled, outgoing response bytes are counted by the server operation:

reply - Normal response bytes
transfer - Zone transfer bytes
other - Other response bytes

Warning

Dynamic update response bytes are not counted by this module.

Default: on

edns-presence¶

If enabled, EDNS pseudo section presence is counted by the message direction:

request - EDNS present in request
response - EDNS present in response

Default: off

flag-presence¶

If enabled, some message header flags are counted:

TC - Truncated Answer in response
DO - DNSSEC OK in request

Default: off

response-code¶

If enabled, outgoing response code is counted:

NOERROR
…
NOTZONE
BADVERS
…
BADCOOKIE
other - All other codes

Note

In the case of multi-message zone transfer response, just one counter is incremented.

Warning

Dynamic update response code is not counted by this module.

Default: on

request-edns-option¶

If enabled, EDNS options in requests are counted by their code:

CODE0
…
EDNS-KEY-TAG (CODE14)
other - All other codes

Default: off

response-edns-option¶

If enabled, EDNS options in responses are counted by their code. See request-edns-option.

Default: off

reply-nodata¶

If enabled, NODATA pseudo RCODE (RFC 2308#section-2.2) is counted by the query type:

A
AAAA
other - All other types

Default: off

query-type¶

If enabled, normal query type is counted:

A (TYPE1)
…
TYPE65
SPF (TYPE99)
…
TYPE110
ANY (TYPE255)
…
TYPE260
other - All other types

Note

Not all assigned meta types (IXFR, AXFR,…) have their own counters, because such types are not processed as normal query.

Default: off

query-size¶

If enabled, normal query message size distribution is counted by the size range in bytes:

0-15
16-31
…
272-287
288-65535

Default: off

reply-size¶

If enabled, normal reply message size distribution is counted by the size range in bytes:

0-15
16-31
…
4080-4095
4096-65535

Default: off

`synthrecord` – Automatic forward/reverse records¶

This module is able to synthesize either forward or reverse records for a given prefix and subnet.

Records are synthesized only if the query can’t be satisfied from the zone. Both IPv4 and IPv6 are supported.

Example¶

Automatic forward records¶

mod-synthrecord:
  - id: test1
    type: forward
    prefix: dynamic-
    ttl: 400
    network: 2620:0:b61::/52

zone:
  - domain: test.
    file: test.zone # Must exist
    module: mod-synthrecord/test1

Result:

$ kdig AAAA dynamic-2620-0000-0b61-0100-0000-0000-0000-0001.test.
...
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;; dynamic-2620-0000-0b61-0100-0000-0000-0000-0001.test. IN AAAA

;; ANSWER SECTION:
dynamic-2620-0000-0b61-0100-0000-0000-0000-0001.test. 400 IN AAAA 2620:0:b61:100::1

You can also have CNAME aliases to the dynamic records, which are going to be further resolved:

$ kdig AAAA alias.test.
...
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;; alias.test. IN AAAA

;; ANSWER SECTION:
alias.test. 3600 IN CNAME dynamic-2620-0000-0b61-0100-0000-0000-0000-0002.test.
dynamic-2620-0000-0b61-0100-0000-0000-0000-0002.test. 400 IN AAAA 2620:0:b61:100::2

Automatic reverse records¶

mod-synthrecord:
  - id: test2
    type: reverse
    prefix: dynamic-
    origin: test
    ttl: 400
    network: 2620:0:b61::/52

zone:
  - domain: 1.6.b.0.0.0.0.0.0.2.6.2.ip6.arpa.
    file: 1.6.b.0.0.0.0.0.0.2.6.2.ip6.arpa.zone # Must exist
    module: mod-synthrecord/test2

Result:

$ kdig -x 2620:0:b61::1
...
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;; 1.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.1.6.b.0.0.0.0.0.0.2.6.2.ip6.arpa. IN PTR

;; ANSWER SECTION:
1.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.1.6.b.0.0.0.0.0.0.2.6.2.ip6.arpa. 400 IN PTR
                               dynamic-2620-0000-0b61-0000-0000-0000-0000-0001.test.

Module reference¶

mod-synthrecord:
  - id: STR
    type: forward | reverse
    prefix: STR
    origin: DNAME
    ttl: INT
    network: ADDR[/INT] | ADDR-ADDR ...

id¶

A module identifier.

type¶

The type of generated records.

Possible values:

forward – Forward records
reverse – Reverse records

Required

prefix¶

A record owner prefix.

Note

The value doesn’t allow dots, address parts in the synthetic names are separated with a dash.

Default: empty

origin¶

A zone origin (only valid for the reverse type).

Required

ttl¶

Time to live of the generated records.

Default: 3600

network¶

An IP address, a network subnet, or a network range the query must match.

Required

`whoami` — Whoami response¶

The module synthesizes an A or AAAA record containing the query source IP address, at the apex of the zone being served. It makes sure to allow Knot DNS to generate cacheable negative responses, and to allow fallback to extra records defined in the underlying zone file. The TTL of the synthesized record is copied from the TTL of the SOA record in the zone file.

Because a DNS query for type A or AAAA has nothing to do with whether the query occurs over IPv4 or IPv6, this module requires a special zone configuration to support both address families. For A queries, the underlying zone must have a set of nameservers that only have IPv4 addresses, and for AAAA queries, the underlying zone must have a set of nameservers that only have IPv6 addresses.

Example¶

To enable this module, you need to add something like the following to the Knot DNS configuration file:

zone:
  - domain: whoami.domain.example
    file: "/path/to/whoami.domain.example"
    module: mod-whoami

zone:
  - domain: whoami6.domain.example
    file: "/path/to/whoami6.domain.example"
    module: mod-whoami

The whoami.domain.example zone file example:

$TTL 1

@       SOA     (
                        whoami.domain.example.          ; MNAME
                        hostmaster.domain.example.      ; RNAME
                        2016051300                      ; SERIAL
                        86400                           ; REFRESH
                        86400                           ; RETRY
                        86400                           ; EXPIRE
                        1                               ; MINIMUM
                )

$TTL 86400

@       NS      ns1.whoami.domain.example.
@       NS      ns2.whoami.domain.example.
@       NS      ns3.whoami.domain.example.
@       NS      ns4.whoami.domain.example.

ns1     A       198.51.100.53
ns2     A       192.0.2.53
ns3     A       203.0.113.53
ns4     A       198.19.123.53

The whoami6.domain.example zone file example:

$TTL 1

@       SOA     (
                        whoami6.domain.example.         ; MNAME
                        hostmaster.domain.example.      ; RNAME
                        2016051300                      ; SERIAL
                        86400                           ; REFRESH
                        86400                           ; RETRY
                        86400                           ; EXPIRE
                        1                               ; MINIMUM
                )

$TTL 86400

@       NS      ns1.whoami6.domain.example.
@       NS      ns2.whoami6.domain.example.
@       NS      ns3.whoami6.domain.example.
@       NS      ns4.whoami6.domain.example.

ns1     AAAA    2001:db8:100::53
ns2     AAAA    2001:db8:200::53
ns3     AAAA    2001:db8:300::53
ns4     AAAA    2001:db8:400::53

The parent domain would then delegate whoami.domain.example to ns[1-4].whoami.domain.example and whoami6.domain.example to ns[1-4].whoami6.domain.example, and include the corresponding A-only or AAAA-only glue records.

Note

This module is not configurable.

Utilities¶

Knot DNS comes with a few DNS client utilities and a few utilities to control the server. This section collects manual pages for all provided binaries:

kdig – Advanced DNS lookup utility¶

Synopsis¶

kdig [common-settings] [query [settings]]…

kdig -h

Description¶

This utility sends one or more DNS queries to a nameserver. Each query can have individual settings, or it can be specified globally via common-settings, which must precede query specification.

Parameters¶

query: name | -q name | -x address | -G tapfile
common-settings, settings: [query_class] [query_type] [@server]… [options]
name: Is a domain name that is to be looked up.
server: Is a domain name or an IPv4 or IPv6 address of the nameserver to send a query to. An additional port can be specified using address:port ([address]:port for IPv6 address), address@port, or address#port notation. If no server is specified, the servers from /etc/resolv.conf are used.

If no arguments are provided, kdig sends NS query for the root zone.

Query classes¶

A query_class can be either a DNS class name (IN, CH) or generic class specification CLASSXXXXX where XXXXX is a corresponding decimal class number. The default query class is IN.

Query types¶

A query_type can be either a DNS resource record type (A, AAAA, NS, SOA, DNSKEY, ANY, etc.) or one of the following:

TYPEXXXXX: Generic query type specification where XXXXX is a corresponding decimal type number.
AXFR: Full zone transfer request.
IXFR=serial: Incremental zone transfer request for specified starting SOA serial number.
NOTIFY=serial: Notify message with a SOA serial hint specified.
NOTIFY: Notify message with a SOA serial hint unspecified.

The default query type is A.

Options¶

-4: Use the IPv4 protocol only.
-6: Use the IPv6 protocol only.
-b address: Set the source IP address of the query to address. The address must be a valid address for local interface or :: or 0.0.0.0. An optional port can be specified in the same format as the server value.
-c class: An explicit query_class specification. See possible values above.
-d: Enable debug messages.
-h, –help: Print the program help.
-k keyfile: Use the TSIG key stored in a file keyfile to authenticate the request. The file must contain the key in the same format as accepted by the -y option.
-p port: Set the nameserver port number or service name to send a query to. The default port is 53.
-q name: Set the query name. An explicit variant of name specification. If no name is provided, empty question section is set.
-t type: An explicit query_type specification. See possible values above.
-V, –version: Print the program version.
-x address: Send a reverse (PTR) query for IPv4 or IPv6 address. The correct name, class and type is set automatically.
-y [alg:]name:key: Use the TSIG key named name to authenticate the request. The alg part specifies the algorithm (the default is hmac-sha256) and key specifies the shared secret encoded in Base64.
-E tapfile: Export a dnstap trace of the query and response messages received to the file tapfile.
-G tapfile: Generate message output from a previously saved dnstap file tapfile.
+[no]multiline: Wrap long records to more lines and improve human readability.
+[no]short: Show record data only.
+[no]generic: Use the generic representation format when printing resource record types and data.
+[no]crypto: Display the DNSSEC keys and signatures values in base64, instead of omitting them.
+[no]aaflag: Set the AA flag.
+[no]tcflag: Set the TC flag.
+[no]rdflag: Set the RD flag.
+[no]recurse: Same as +[no]rdflag
+[no]raflag: Set the RA flag.
+[no]zflag: Set the zero flag bit.
+[no]adflag: Set the AD flag.
+[no]cdflag: Set the CD flag.
+[no]dnssec: Set the DO flag.
+[no]all: Show all packet sections.
+[no]qr: Show the query packet.
+[no]header: Show the packet header.
+[no]comments: Show commented section names.
+[no]opt: Show the EDNS pseudosection.
+[no]question: Show the question section.
+[no]answer: Show the answer section.
+[no]authority: Show the authority section.
+[no]additional: Show the additional section.
+[no]tsig: Show the TSIG pseudosection.
+[no]stats: Show trailing packet statistics.
+[no]class: Show the DNS class.
+[no]ttl: Show the TTL value.
+[no]tcp: Use the TCP protocol (default is UDP for standard query and TCP for AXFR/IXFR).
+[no]fastopen: Use TCP Fast Open (default with TCP).
+[no]ignore: Don’t use TCP automatically if a truncated reply is received.
+[no]tls: Use TLS with the Opportunistic privacy profile (RFC 7858#section-4.1).
+[no]tls-ca[=FILE]: Use TLS with a certificate validation. Certification authority certificates are loaded from the specified PEM file (default is system certificate storage if no argument is provided). Can be specified multiple times. If the +tls-hostname option is not provided, the name of the target server (if specified) is used for strict authentication.
+[no]tls-pin=BASE64: Use TLS with the Out-of-Band key-pinned privacy profile (RFC 7858#section-4.2). The PIN must be a Base64 encoded SHA-256 hash of the X.509 SubjectPublicKeyInfo. Can be specified multiple times.
+[no]tls-hostname=STR: Use TLS with a remote server hostname check.
+[no]tls-sni=STR: Use TLS with a Server Name Indication.
+[no]tls-keyfile=FILE: Use TLS with a client keyfile.
+[no]tls-certfile=FILE: Use TLS with a client certfile.
+[no]nsid: Request the nameserver identifier (NSID).
+[no]bufsize=B: Set EDNS buffer size in bytes (default is 512 bytes).
+[no]padding[=B]: Use EDNS(0) padding option to pad queries, optionally to a specific size. The default is to pad queries with a sensible amount when using +tls, and not to pad at all when queries are sent without TLS. With no argument (i.e., just +padding) pad every query with a sensible amount regardless of the use of TLS. With +nopadding, never pad.
+[no]alignment[=B]: Align the query to B-byte-block message using the EDNS(0) padding option (default is no or 128 if no argument is specified).
+[no]subnet=SUBN: Set EDNS(0) client subnet SUBN=addr/prefix.
+[no]edns[=N]: Use EDNS version (default is 0).
+[no]timeout=T: Set the wait-for-reply interval in seconds (default is 5 seconds). This timeout applies to each query attempt.
+[no]retry=N: Set the number (>=0) of UDP retries (default is 2). This doesn’t apply to AXFR/IXFR.
+[no]cookie=HEX: Attach EDNS(0) cookie to the query.
+[no]badcookie: Repeat a query with the correct cookie.
+[no]ednsopt[=CODE[:HEX]]: Send custom EDNS option. The CODE is EDNS option code in decimal, HEX is an optional hex encoded string to use as EDNS option value. This argument can be used multiple times. +noednsopt clears all EDNS options specified by +ednsopt.
+noidn: Disable the IDN transformation to ASCII and vice versa. IDN support depends on libidn availability during project building! If used in common-settings, all IDN transformations are disabled. If used in the individual query settings, transformation from ASCII is disabled on output for the particular query. Note that IDN transformation does not preserve domain name letter case.

Notes¶

Options -k and -y can not be used simultaneously.

Dnssec-keygen keyfile format is not supported. Use keymgr(8) instead.

Exit values¶

Exit status of 0 means successful operation. Any other exit status indicates an error.

Examples¶

Get A records for example.com:
```
$ kdig example.com A
```
Perform AXFR for zone example.com from the server 192.0.2.1:
```
$ kdig example.com -t AXFR @192.0.2.1
```
Get A records for example.com from 192.0.2.1 and reverse lookup for address 2001:DB8::1 from 192.0.2.2. Both using the TCP protocol:
```
$ kdig +tcp example.com -t A @192.0.2.1 -x 2001:DB8::1 @192.0.2.2
```
Get SOA record for example.com, use TLS, use system certificates, check for specified hostname, check for certificate pin, and print additional debug info:
```
$ kdig -d @185.49.141.38 +tls-ca +tls-host=getdnsapi.net \
  +tls-pin=foxZRnIh9gZpWnl+zEiKa0EJ2rdCGroMWm02gaxSc9S= soa example.com
```

Files¶

/etc/resolv.conf

keymgr – Key management utility¶

Synopsis¶

keymgr basic_option [parameters…]

keymgr [config_option config_storage] zone command argument…

Description¶

The keymgr utility serves for manual key management in Knot DNS server.

Functions for DNSSEC keys and KASP (Key And Signature Policy) management are provided.

The DNSSEC and KASP configuration is stored in a so called KASP database. The database is backed by LMDB.

Basic options¶

-h, –help: Print the program help.
-V, –version: Print the program version.
-t, –tsig tsig_name [tsig_algorithm] [tsig_bits]: Generates a TSIG key. TSIG algorithm can be specified by string (default: hmac-sha256), bit length of the key by number (default: optimal length given by algorithm). The generated TSIG key is only displayed on stdout: the command does not create a file, nor include the key in a keystore.

Config options¶

-c, –config file: Use a textual configuration file (default is @config_dir@/knot.conf).
-C, –confdb directory: Use a binary configuration database directory (default is @storage_dir@/confdb). The default configuration database, if exists, has a preference to the default configuration file.
-d, –dir path: Use specified KASP database path and default configuration.

Note

Keymgr runs with the same user privileges as configured for knotd. For example, if keymgr is run as root, but the configured user is knot, it won’t be able to read files (PEM files, KASP db, …) readable only by root.

Commands¶

list [timestamp_format]: Prints the list of key IDs and parameters of keys belonging to the zone.
generate [arguments…]: Generates new DNSSEC key and stores it in KASP database. Prints the key ID. This action takes some number of arguments (see below). Values for unspecified arguments are taken from corresponding policy (if -c or -C options used) or from Knot policy defaults.
import-bind BIND_key_file: Imports a BIND-style key into KASP database (converting it to PEM format). Takes one argument: path to BIND key file (private or public, but both MUST exist).
import-pub BIND_pubkey_file: Imports a public key into KASP database. This key won’t be rollovered nor used for signing. Takes one argument: path to BIND public key file.
import-pem PEM_file [arguments…]: Imports a DNSSEC key from PEM file. The key parameters (same as for the generate action) need to be specified (mainly algorithm, timers…) because they are not contained in the PEM format.
import-pkcs11 key_id [arguments…]: Imports a DNSSEC key from PKCS #11 storage. The key parameters (same as for the generate action) need to be specified (mainly algorithm, timers…) because they are not available. In fact, no key data is imported, only KASP database metadata is created.
nsec3-salt [new_salt]: Prints the current NSEC3 salt used for signing. If new_salt is specified, the salt is overwritten. The salt is printed and expected in hexadecimal, or dash if empty.
set key_spec [arguments…]: Changes a timing argument (or ksk/zsk) of an existing key to a new value. Key_spec is either the key tag or a prefix of the key ID, with an optional [id=|keytag=] prefix; arguments are like for generate, but just the related ones.
ds [key_spec]: Generate DS record (all digest algorithms together) for specified key. Key_spec is like for set, if unspecified, all KSKs are used.
dnskey [key_spec]: Generate DNSKEY record for specified key. Key_spec is like for ds, if unspecified, all KSKs are used.
delete key_spec: Remove the specified key from zone. If the key was not shared, it is also deleted from keystore.
share key_ID: Import a key (specified by full key ID) from another zone as shared. After this, the key is owned by both zones equally.

Generate arguments¶

Arguments are separated by space, each of them is in format ‘name=value’.

algorithm: Either an algorithm number (e.g. 14), or text name without dashes (e.g. ECDSAP384SHA384).
size: Key length in bits.
ksk: If set to yes, the key will be used for signing DNSKEY rrset. The generated key will also have the Secure Entry Point flag set to 1.
zsk: If set to yes, the key will be used for signing zone (except DNSKEY rrset). This flag can be set concurrently with the ksk flag.
sep: Overrides the standard setting of the Secure Entry Point flag for the generated key.

The following arguments are timestamps of key lifetime (see DNSSEC key states):

pre_active: Key started to be used for signing, not published (only for algorithm rollover).
publish: Key published.
ready: Key used for signing and submitted to the parent zone (only for KSK).
active: Key used for signing.
retire_active: Key still used for signing, but another key is active (only for KSK or algorithm rollover).
retire: Key still published, but no longer used for signing.
post_active: Key no longer published, but still used for signing (only for algorithm rollover).
remove: Key deleted.

Timestamps¶

0: Zero timestamp means infinite future.
UNIX_time: Positive number of seconds since 1970 UTC.
YYYYMMDDHHMMSS: Date and time in this format without any punctuation.
relative_timestamp: A sign character (+, -), a number, and an optional time unit (y, mo, d, h, mi, s). The default unit is one second. E.g. +1mi, -2mo.

Output timestamp formats¶

(none): The timestamps are printed as UNIX timestamp.
human: The timestamps are printed relatively to now using time units (e.g. -2y5mo, +1h13s).
iso: The timestamps are printed in the ISO8601 format (e.g. 2016-12-31T23:59:00).

Exit values¶

Exit status of 0 means successful operation. Any other exit status indicates an error.

Examples¶

Generate new TSIG key:
```
$ keymgr -t my_name hmac-sha384
```

Generate new DNSSEC key:

$ keymgr example.com. generate algorithm=ECDSAP256SHA256 size=256 \
  ksk=true created=1488034625 publish=20170223205611 retire=+10mo remove=+1y

Import a DNSSEC key from BIND:

$ keymgr example.com. import-bind ~/bind/Kharbinge4d5.+007+63089.key

Configure key timing:

$ keymgr example.com. set 4208 active=+2mi retire=+4mi remove=+5mi

Share a KSK from another zone:

$ keymgr example.com. share e687cf927029e9db7184d2ece6d663f5d1e5b0e9

khost – Simple DNS lookup utility¶

Synopsis¶

khost [options] name [server]

Description¶

This utility sends a DNS query for the name to the server and prints a reply in more user-readable form. For more advanced DNS queries use kdig instead.

Parameters¶

name: Is a domain name that is to be looked up. If the name is IPv4 or IPv6 address the PTR query type is used.
server: Is a name or an address of the nameserver to send a query to. The address can be specified using [address]:port notation. If no server is specified, the servers from /etc/resolv.conf are used.

If no arguments are provided, khost prints a short help.

Options¶

-4: Use the IPv4 protocol only.
-6: Use the IPv6 protocol only.
-a: Send ANY query with verbose mode.
-d: Enable debug messages.
-h, –help: Print the program help.
-r: Disable recursion.
-T: Use the TCP protocol.
-v: Enable verbose output.
-V, –version: Print the program version.
-w: Wait forever for the reply.
-c class: Set the query class (e.g. CH, CLASS4). The default class is IN.
-t type: Set the query type (e.g. NS, IXFR=12345, TYPE65535). The default is to send 3 queries (A, AAAA and MX).
-R retries: The number (>=0) of UDP retries to query a nameserver. The default is 1.
-W wait: The time to wait for a reply in seconds. This timeout applies to each query try. The default is 2 seconds.

Exit values¶

Exit status of 0 means successful operation. Any other exit status indicates an error.

Examples¶

Get the A, AAAA and MX records for example.com:
```
$ khost example.com
```
Get the reverse record for address 192.0.2.1:
```
$ khost 192.0.2.1
```
Perform a verbose zone transfer for zone example.com:
```
$ khost -t AXFR -v example.com
```

Files¶

/etc/resolv.conf

kjournalprint – Knot DNS journal print utility¶

Synopsis¶

kjournalprint [options] journal_db zone_name

Description¶

The program prints zone history stored in a journal database. As default, changes are colored for terminal.

Options¶

-l, –limit limit: Limits the number of displayed changes.
-d, –debug: Debug mode brief output.
-n, –no-color: Removes changes coloring.
-z, –zone-list: Instead of reading jurnal, display the list of zones in the DB. (zone_name not needed)
-c, –check: Enable additional journal semantic checks during printing.
-h, –help: Print the program help.
-V, –version: Print the program version.

Parameters¶

journal_db: A path to the journal database.
zone_name: A name of the zone to print the history for.

Exit values¶

Exit status of 0 means successful operation. Any other exit status indicates an error.

Examples¶

Last (most recent) 5 changes without colors:

$ kjournalprint -nl 5 /var/lib/knot/journal example.com.

knotc – Knot DNS control utility¶

Synopsis¶

knotc [parameters] action [action_args]

Description¶

If no action is specified, the program is executed in interactive mode.

Parameters¶

-c, –config file: Use a textual configuration file (default is @config_dir@/knot.conf).
-C, –confdb directory: Use a binary configuration database directory (default is @storage_dir@/confdb). The default configuration database, if exists, has a preference to the default configuration file.
-m, –max-conf-size MiB: Set maximum size of the configuration database (default is @conf_mapsize@ MiB, maximum 10000 MiB).
-s, –socket path: Use a control UNIX socket path (default is @run_dir@/knot.sock).
-t, –timeout seconds: Use a control timeout in seconds. Set 0 for infinity (default is 10).
-b, –blocking: Zone event trigger commands wait until the event is finished.
-f, –force: Forced operation. Overrides some checks.
-v, –verbose: Enable debug output.
-h, –help: Print the program help.
-V, –version: Print the program version.

Actions¶

status [detail]: Check if the server is running. Details are version for the running server version, workers for the numbers of worker threads, or configure for the configure summary.
stop: Stop the server if running.
reload: Reload the server configuration and modified zone files. All open zone transactions will be aborted!
stats [module[.counter]]: Show global statistics counter(s). To print also counters with value 0, use force option.
zone-status zone [filter]: Show the zone status. Filters are +role, +serial, +transaction, +events, and +freeze.
zone-check [zone…]: Test if the server can load the zone. Semantic checks are executed if enabled in the configuration. When invoked with flag -f/–force an error is returned when semantic check warning appears. (*)
zone-memstats [zone…]: Estimate memory use for the zone. (*)
zone-reload [zone…]: Trigger a zone reload from a disk without checking its modification time. For slave zone, the refresh from a master server is scheduled; for master zone, the notification of slave servers is scheduled. An open zone transaction will be aborted! (#)
zone-refresh [zone…]: Trigger a check for the zone serial on the zone’s master. If the master has a newer zone, a transfer is scheduled. This command is valid for slave zones. (#)
zone-retransfer [zone…]: Trigger a zone transfer from the zone’s master. The server doesn’t check the serial of the master’s zone. This command is valid for slave zones. (#)
zone-notify [zone…]: Trigger a NOTIFY message to all configured remotes. This can help in cases when previous NOTIFY had been lost or the slaves offline. (#)
zone-flush [zone…] [+outdir directory]: Trigger a zone journal flush to the configured zone file. If an output directory is specified, the current zone is immediately dumped (in the blocking mode) to a zone file in the specified directory. (#)
zone-sign [zone…]: Trigger a DNSSEC re-sign of the zone. Existing signatures will be dropped. This command is valid for zones with DNSSEC signing enabled. (#)
zone-key-rollover zone key_type: Trigger immediate key rollover. Publish new key and start a key rollover, even when the key has a lifetime to go. Key type can be ksk (also for CSK) or zsk. This command is valid for zones with DNSSEC signing and automatic key management enabled. Note that complete key rollover consists of several steps and the blocking mode relates to the initial one only! (#)
zone-ksk-submitted zone…: Use when the zone’s KSK rollover is in submission phase. By calling this command the user confirms manually that the parent zone contains DS record for the new KSK in submission phase and the old KSK can be retired. (#)
zone-freeze [zone…]: Temporarily postpone zone-changing events (load, refresh, update, flush, and DNSSEC signing). (#)
zone-thaw [zone…]: Dismiss zone freeze. (#)
zone-read zone [owner [type]]: Get zone data that are currently being presented.
zone-begin zone…: Begin a zone transaction.
zone-commit zone…: Commit the zone transaction. All changes are applied to the zone.
zone-abort zone…: Abort the zone transaction. All changes are discarded.
zone-diff zone: Get zone changes within the transaction.
zone-get zone [owner [type]]: Get zone data within the transaction.
zone-set zone owner [ttl] type rdata: Add zone record within the transaction. The first record in a rrset requires a ttl value specified.
zone-unset zone owner [type [rdata]]: Remove zone data within the transaction.
zone-purge zone… [filter…]: Purge zone data, zone file, journal, timers, and/or KASP data of specified zones. Available filters are +expire, +zonefile, +journal, +timers, and +kaspdb. If no filter is specified, all filters are enabled. If the zone is no longer configured, add +orphan filter (zone file cannot be purged in this case). (#)
zone-stats zone [module[.counter]]: Show zone statistics counter(s). To print also counters with value 0, use force option.
conf-init: Initialize the configuration database. (*)
conf-check: Check the server configuration. (*)
conf-import filename: Import a configuration file into the configuration database. Ensure the server is not using the configuration database! (*)
conf-export [filename]: Export the configuration database into a config file or stdout. (*)
conf-list [item]: List the configuration database sections or section items.
conf-read [item]: Read the item from the active configuration database.
conf-begin: Begin a writing configuration database transaction. Only one transaction can be opened at a time.
conf-commit: Commit the configuration database transaction.
conf-abort: Rollback the configuration database transaction.
conf-diff [item]: Get the item difference in the transaction.
conf-get [item]: Get the item data from the transaction.
conf-set item [data…]: Set the item data in the transaction.
conf-unset [item] [data…]: Unset the item data in the transaction.

Note¶

Empty or – zone parameter means all zones or all zones with a transaction.

Use @ owner to denote the zone name.

Type item parameter in the form of section[[id]][.name].

(*) indicates a local operation which requires a configuration.

(#) indicates an optionally blocking operation.

The -b and -f options can be placed right after the command name.

Interactive mode¶

The utility provides interactive mode with basic line editing functionality, command completion, and command history.

Interactive mode behavior can be customized in ~/.editrc. Refer to editrc(5) for details.

Command history is saved in ~/.knotc_history.

Exit values¶

Exit status of 0 means successful operation. Any other exit status indicates an error.

Examples¶

Reload the whole server configuration¶

$ knotc reload

Flush the example.com and example.org zones¶

$ knotc zone-flush example.com example.org

Get the current server configuration¶

$ knotc conf-read server

Get the list of the current zones¶

$ knotc conf-read zone.domain

Get the master remotes for the example.com zone¶

$ knotc conf-read 'zone[example.com].master'

Add example.org zone with a zonefile location¶

$ knotc conf-begin
$ knotc conf-set 'zone[example.org]'
$ knotc conf-set 'zone[example.org].file' '/var/zones/example.org.zone'
$ knotc conf-commit

Get the SOA record for each configured zone¶

$ knotc zone-read -- @ SOA

knotd – Knot DNS server daemon¶

Synopsis¶

knotd [parameters]

Description¶

Parameters¶

-c, –config file: Use a textual configuration file (default is @config_dir@/knot.conf).
-C, –confdb directory: Use a binary configuration database directory (default is @storage_dir@/confdb). The default configuration database, if exists, has a preference to the default configuration file.
-m, –max-conf-size MiB: Set maximum size of the configuration database (default is @conf_mapsize@ MiB, maximum 10000 MiB).
-s, –socket path: Use a remote control UNIX socket path (default is @run_dir@/knot.sock).
-d, –daemonize [directory]: Run the server as a daemon. New root directory may be specified (default is /).
-v, –verbose: Enable debug output.
-h, –help: Print the program help.
-V, –version: Print the program version.

Exit values¶

Exit status of 0 means successful operation. Any other exit status indicates an error.

knsec3hash – NSEC hash computation utility¶

Synopsis¶

knsec3hash salt algorithm iterations name

Description¶

This utility generates a NSEC3 hash for a given domain name and parameters of NSEC3 hash.

Parameters¶

salt: Specifies a binary salt encoded as a hexadecimal string.
algorithm: Specifies a hashing algorithm by number. Currently, the only supported algorithm is SHA-1 (number 1).
iterations: Specifies the number of additional iterations of the hashing algorithm.
name: Specifies the domain name to be hashed.

Exit values¶

Exit status of 0 means successful operation. Any other exit status indicates an error.

Examples¶

$ knsec3hash c01dcafe 1 10 knot-dns.cz
7PTVGE7QV67EM61ROS9238P5RAKR2DM7 (salt=c01dcafe, hash=1, iterations=10)

$ knsec3hash - 1 0 net
A1RT98BS5QGC9NFI51S9HCI47ULJG6JH (salt=-, hash=1, iterations=0)

knsupdate – Dynamic DNS update utility¶

Synopsis¶

knsupdate [options] [filename]

Description¶

This utility sends Dynamic DNS update messages to a DNS server. Update content is read from a file (if the parameter filename is given) or from the standard input.

The format of updates is textual and is made up of commands. Every command is placed on the separate line of the input. Lines starting with a semicolon are comments and are not processed.

Options¶

-d: Enable debug messages.
-h, –help: Print the program help.
-k keyfile: Use the TSIG key stored in a file keyfile to authenticate the request. The file should contain the key in the same format, which is accepted by the -y option.
-p port: Set the port to use for connections to the server (if not explicitly specified in the update). The default is 53.
-r retries: The number of retries for UDP requests. The default is 3.
-t timeout: The total timeout (for all UDP update tries) of the update request in seconds. The default is 12. If set to zero, the timeout is infinite.
-v: Use a TCP connection.
-V, –version: Print the program version.
-y [alg:]name:key: Use the TSIG key with a name name to authenticate the request. The alg part specifies the algorithm (the default is hmac-sha256) and key specifies the shared secret encoded in Base64.

Commands¶

server name [port]: Specifies a receiving server of the dynamic update message. The name parameter can be either a host name or an IP address. If the port is not specified, the default port is used. The default port value can be controlled using the -p program option.
local address [port]: Specifies outgoing address and port. If no local is specified, the address and port are set by the system automatically. The default port number is 0.
zone name: Specifies that all updates are done within a zone name. If not used, the default zone is the root zone.
origin name: Specifies fully qualified domain name suffix which is appended to non-fqd owners in update commands. The default origin is the root zone.
class name: Sets name as the default class for all updates. If not used, the default class is IN.
ttl value: Sets value as the default TTL (in seconds). If not used, the default value is 0.
key [alg:]name key: Specifies the TSIG key named name to authenticate the request. An optional alg algorithm can be specified. This command has the same effect as the program option -y.
[prereq] nxdomain name: Adds a prerequisite for a non-existing record owned by name.
[prereq] yxdomain name: Adds a prerequisite for an existing record owned by name.
[prereq] nxrrset name [class] type: Adds a prerequisite for a non-existing record of the type owned by name. Internet class is expected.
[prereq] yxrrset name [class] type [data]: Adds a prerequisite for an existing record of the type owned by name with optional data. Internet class is expected.
[update] add name [ttl] [class] type data: Adds a request to add a new resource record into the zone. Please note that if the name is not fully qualified domain name, the current origin name is appended to it.
[update] del[ete] name [ttl] [class] [type] [data]: Adds a request to remove all (or matching class, type or data) resource records from the zone. There is the same requirement for the name parameter as in update add command. The ttl item is ignored.
show: Displays current content of the update message.
send: Sends the current update message and cleans the list of updates.
answer: Displays the last answer from the server.
debug: Enable debugging. This command has the same meaning as the -d program option.
quit: Quit the program.

Notes¶

Options -k and -y can not be used simultaneously.

Dnssec-keygen keyfile format is not supported. Use keymgr(8) instead.

Zone name/server guessing is not supported if the zone name/server is not specified.

Empty line doesn’t send the update.

Exit values¶

Exit status of 0 means successful operation. Any other exit status indicates an error.

Examples¶

Send one update of the zone example.com to the server 192.168.1.1. The update contains two new records:

$ knsupdate
> server 192.168.1.1
> zone example.com.
> origin example.com.
> ttl 3600
> add test1.example.com. 7200 A 192.168.2.2
> add test2 TXT "hello"
> show
> send
> answer
> quit

kzonecheck – Knot DNS zone file checking tool¶

Synopsis¶

kzonecheck [options] filename

Description¶

The utility checks zone file syntax and runs semantic checks on the zone content. The executed checks are the same as the checks run by the Knot DNS server.

Please, refer to the semantic-checks configuration option in knot.conf(5) for the full list of available semantic checks.

Options¶

-o, –origin origin: Zone origin. If not specified, the origin is determined from the file name (possibly removing the .zone suffix).
-t, –time time: Current time specification. Use UNIX timestamp, YYYYMMDDHHmmSS format, or [+/-]time[unit] format, where unit can be Y, M, D, h, m, or s. Default is current UNIX timestamp.
-v, –verbose: Enable debug output.
-h, –help: Print the program help.
-V, –version: Print the program version.

Exit values¶

Exit status of 0 means successful operation. Any other exit status indicates an error.

Migration¶

Upgrade 2.4.x to 2.5.x¶

This chapter describes some steps necessary after upgrading Knot DNS from version 2.4.x to 2.5.x.

Building changes¶

The --enable-dnstap configure option now enables the dnstap support in kdig only! To build the dnstap query module, --with-module-dnstap have to be used.

Since Knot DNS version 2.5.0 each query module can be configured to be:

disabled: --with-module-MODULE_NAME=no
embedded: --with-module-MODULE_NAME=yes
external: --with-module-MODULE_NAME=shared (excluding dnsproxy and onlinesign)

The --with-timer-mapsize configure option was replaced with the runtime max-timer-db-size configuration option.

KASP DB migration¶

Knot DNS version 2.4.x and earlier uses JSON files to store DNSSEC keys metadata, one for each zone. 2.5.x versions store those in binary format in a LMDB, all zones together. The migration is possible with the pykeymgr script:

$ pykeymgr -i path/to/keydir

The path to KASP DB directory is configuration-dependent, usually it is the keys subdirectory in the zone storage.

In rare installations, the JSON files might be spread across more directories. In such case, it is necessary to put them together into one directory and migrate at once.

Configuration changes¶

It is no longer possible to configure KASP DB per zone or in a non-default template. Ensure just one common KASP DB configuration in the default template.

As Knot DNS version 2.5.0 brings dynamically loaded modules, some modules were renamed for technical reasons. So it is necessary to rename all occurrences (module section names and references from zones or templates) of the following module names in the configuration:

mod-online-sign -> mod-onlinesign

mod-synth-record -> mod-synthrecord

Upgrade 2.5.x to 2.6.x¶

Upgrading from Knot DNS version 2.5.x to 2.6.x is almost seamless.

Configuration changes¶

The dsa and dsa-nsec3-sha1 algorithm values are no longer supported by the algorithm option.

The ixfr-from-differences zone/template option was deprecated in favor of the zonefile-load option.

Upgrade 2.6.x to 2.7.x¶

Upgrading from Knot DNS version 2.6.x to 2.7.x is seamless if no obsolete configuration or module rosedb is used.

Upgrade 2.7.x to 2.8.x¶

Upgrading from Knot DNS version 2.7.x to 2.8.x is seamless.

However, if the previous version was migrated (possibly indirectly) from version 2.5.x, the format of the keys stored in Keys And Signature Policy Database is no longer compatible and needs to be updated.

The easiest ways to update how keys are stored in KASP DB is to modify with Keymgr version 2.7.x some of each key’s parameters in an undamaging way, e.g.:

$ keymgr example.com. list
$ keymgr example.com. set <keyTag> created=1
$ keymgr example.com. set <keyTag2> created=1
...

Knot DNS for BIND users¶

Automatic DNSSEC signing¶

Migrating automatically signed zones from BIND to Knot DNS requires copying up-to-date zone files from BIND, importing existing private keys, and updating server configuration:

To obtain current content of the zone which is being migrated, request BIND to flush the zone into the zone file: rndc sync example.com.
Note

If dynamic updates (DDNS) are enabled for the given zone, you might need to freeze the zone before flushing it. That can be done similarly:
```
$ rndc freeze example.com
```
Copy the fresh zone file into the zones storage directory of Knot DNS.
Import all existing zone keys into the KASP database. Make sure that all the keys were imported correctly:
```
$ keymgr example.com. import-bind path/to/Kexample.com.+013+11111
$ keymgr example.com. import-bind path/to/Kexample.com.+013+22222
$ ...
$ keymgr example.com. list
```
Note

If the server configuration file or database is not at the default location, add a configuration parameter (-c or -C). See keymgr for more info about required access rights to the key files.
Follow Automatic DNSSEC signing steps to configure DNSSEC signing.

Appendices¶

Compatible PKCS #11 Devices¶

This section has informative character. Knot DNS has been tested with several devices which claim to support PKCS #11 interface. The following table indicates which algorithms and operations have been observed to work. Please notice minimal GnuTLS library version required for particular algorithm support.

	Key generate	Key import	ED25519 256-bit	ECDSA 256-bit	ECDSA 384-bit	RSA 1024-bit	RSA 2048-bit	RSA 4096-bit
Feitian ePass 2003	yes	no	no	no	no	yes	yes	no
SafeNet Network HSM (Luna SA 4)	yes	no	no	no	no	yes	yes	yes
SoftHSM 2.0	yes	yes	no	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
Trustway Proteccio NetHSM	yes	ECDSA only	no	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
Utimaco SecurityServer (V4) [1]	yes	yes	no	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes

[1]	Requires setting the number of background workers to 1!

The following table summarizes supported DNSSEC algorithm numbers and minimal GnuTLS library version required. Any algorithm may work with older library, however the supported operations may be limited (e.g. private key import).

	Numbers	GnuTLS version
ED25519	15	3.6.0 or newer
ECDSA	13, 14	3.4.8 or newer
RSA	5, 7, 8, 10	3.4.6 or newer