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How to enable PowerDNS's incoming DNS query logging.

Timothy Haines
  • Updated

Introduction

On certain occasions enabling PowerDNS's query logging is necessary to find answers to dns-related issues.

 

This how-to provides information on how to enable all of the above debug contexts.

 

Procedure

  1. Log in to the server via SSH as root. 

  2. Open the PowerDNS main configuration file with your favorite text editor, which is located in              "/etc/pdns/pdns.conf".

  3. Enable the following settings by uncommenting the directive and configuring the following: 
    log-dns-queries=yes
    loglevel=5

  4. Make sure to save the changes.

  5. Restart the PowerDNS service by executing the following command: 
    /scripts/restartsrv_pdns

Once the above steps have been performed, you can see debug entries within the "/var/log/messages" file, for example, DNS query:

Jun 3 05:56:49 10-2-34-54 pdns_server: Remote 123.123.123.123 wants 'example.com|A', do = 0, bufsize = 1232 (4096): packetcache MISS

Please note that this will tell PowerDNS to log all incoming DNS queries, which will lead to a lot of logging.  We would recommend doing this only for debugging purposes. 

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