The Design of the Dents DNS Server

Dents is a server implementation of the Internet's Domain name System. Dents main features are a modular driver architecture, a CORBA-based control facility, a replaceable tree system, a clean design and good karma. Dents is free software, licensed under version 2 of the GPL. In this paper, I describe the design of Dents, concentrating on the innovations and evolutions it embodies, and including the future directions in which we hope to take the server. I describe some of the problems we've had. Finally, I summarize some lessons about server design which Dents reflects.