DNS is simple. Yet, implementation of DNS servers is not so simple. Delphinus DNS is an authoritative, non-caching, non-recursing DNS serger written for research into the DNS system so that perhaps one day the author has a better understanding of it.

It's developed on OpenBSD, due to pledge(2) and other security mitigations. It is recommended that serious users also use OpenBSD. DelphinusDNSd chroots and privseps on all platforms, meaning that a direct root exploit is not possible.

Ports to other OS's exist (FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux and MacOS) for those that cannot do without those platforms, but at the risk of more attack surface.

The name “delphinus” was picked in honor of a constellation in the northern hemispheres summer night sky. The logo on this webpage is actually an overlay of an actual photo taken of this constellation, so it is to scale. Since delphinus has weird names for its stars such as Rotanev and Sualocin which were named by an Italian astronomer after his own name, delphinusdns then fits as being a weird name-server.

Fetch lastest release or grab a snapshot and extract it:

$ ftp https://delphinusdns.org/download/snapshot/delphinusdnsd-snapshot.tgz
$ tar xzf delphinusdnsd-snapshot.tgz

Create _ddd user and then compile and install it:

$ useradd -m _ddd
$ cd delphinusdnsd-20200102/
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

Now you just need to create a delphinusdns.conf (you can edit an example config) and start the daemon:

$ cp $HOME/delphinusdnsd-20200102/examples/Master/example1.conf /etc/delphinusdns/delphinusdns.conf
$ dddctl start -f /etc/delphinusdns/delphinusdns.conf