Running Virtual Instances¶

It may be advantageous to run multiple separate PowerDNS installations on a single host, for example to make sure that different customers cannot affect each others zones. PowerDNS fully supports running multiple instances on one host.

To generate additional PowerDNS instances, create a pdns-NAME.conf in your configuration directory (usually /etc/powerdns), where NAME is the name of your virtual configuration.

Following one of the following instructions, PowerDNS will read its configuration from the pdns-NAME.conf instead of pdns.conf.

Starting virtual instances with Sysv init-scripts¶

Symlink the init.d script pdns to pdns-NAME, where NAME is the name of your virtual configuration.

Internally, the init script calls the binary with the config-name option set to name, setting in motion the loading of separate configuration files.

When you launch a virtual instance of PowerDNS, the pid-file is saved inside socket-dir as pdns-name.pid.

Starting virtual instances with systemd¶

With systemd it is as simple as calling the correct service instance. Assuming your instance is called myinstance and pdns-myinstance.conf exists in the configuration directory, the following command will start the service:

systemctl start pdns@myinstance.service

Similarly you can enable it at boot:

systemctl enable pdns@myinstance.service