Re: OT - Small DNS "appliances" for remote offices.

[Rob Seastrom <rs () seastrom com>]

Peter Kristolaitis <alter3d () alter3d ca> writes:

> Not "industrial grade", but Raspberry Pis are pretty great for this
> kind of low-horsepower application.  Throw 2 at each site for
> redundancy and you have a low-powered, physically small, cheap, dead
> silent, easily replaceable system for ~$150 per site.

The Pi is low-powered in more ways than one.  Last fall I ran some
(admittedly fairly simple minded) DNS benchmarks against a Raspberry
Pi Model B and an ODROID U3.

Particularly if you have DNSSEC validation enabled, the Pi is
underwhelming in performance (81 qps in the validation case, 164
without).

The U3 is circa 325 qps with or without DNSSEC validation on, which
suggests that something else other than crypto-computes is the long
pole in the tent.

I haven't gotten motivated to try this against the ODROID-C1 that I
acquired later in December, nor have I sourced a Raspberry Pi 2.  For
anyone who's feeling motivated to do this (please send along
results!), the methodology I used is at http://technotes.seastrom.com/node/53

-r

PS: don't miss the opportunity to run real honest-to-god isc-dhcpd on
same machine rather than whatever your router provides you; you'll be
glad you did.