BIND vs DNS Commander

[Nate Duehr]

On Sun, Apr 15, 2001 at 01:24:11PM +0100, Jim Reid wrote:
> >>>>> "Nate" == Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com> writes:
> 
>     Nate> If they MUST have a GUI, get someone out to demo Lucent's
>     Nate> QIP for you -- but expect quite a bit of work and MONEY to
>     Nate> get it up and running.
> 
>     Nate> If you want more information about my company's recent
>     Nate> evaluation process (and why we finally decided a "roll your
>     Nate> own" solution fit our needs best)
> 
> So you claim QIP is/was impressive yet you decided to use your own DNS
> administration solution. I see. Does anyone else spot the contradiction?

QIP *was* impressive technically.  However, it was also far too expensive.
It was a business decision, not a technical one.  No contradiction, just
offering options to someone who still has them.  Our decision was made
as a team, and we decided we could create something home-grown that
would meet our requirements and save some money -- but not without first
finding a number of commercial products to look at to try to save the
time necessary to build, debug, and test a home-grown solution.

> The fact that QIP "failed to fit your needs" pretty much tells its own
> story. You could make the same complaint of just about any of these
> so-called DNS administration tools, not only QIP. Anybody can come up
> with a GUI for DNS administration. That's trivial: a simple matter of
> programming. The hard part is providing a tool that supports the
> procedures and business processes surounding an organisation's DNS
> administration. By itself a point and click interface is barely an
> improvement on editing zone and config files by hand. I know of quite
> a few companies who have bought these solutions and found their
> wallets are a lot lighter and they still have the same DNS problems
> that they had before. The only difference is they now have a cute GUI
> for pointing and clicking at things.

In this case, my *personal* opinion is to agree with you.  COTS software
does have the disadvantage of sometimes not being flexible enough to
meet the business procedures of a company.  Sometimes the procedures
bend to meet the software tool, sometimes the software tool is
ineffective -- our decision to use a custom-built tool was not a light
one in this day of tight IT/Software Development resource allocation --
choosing to build a customer app was actually a SURPRISE to me as our
various decision-makers weighed the facts for our organization.  Many of
our managers *like* Commercial Off-The-Shelf software and fight mightily
for it.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20 -- we'll see if the decision to "roll our
own" was the right one -- *next* year.  :-)

-- 
Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com>

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