commercial dns vendors

Simon Waters Simon at wretched.demon.co.uk
Fri Sep 6 08:54:19 UTC 2002


Farid Hamjavar wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know of a compiled list of pros/cons
> about major commercial DNS hardware appliance vendors.
> 
> Any opinions particularly  about infoblox ?

Apart from systems like cobalt RAQs where DNS is an incidental
the infoblox is the only dedicated hardware device I've seen for
DNS and DHCP.

I have a review I did somewhere when I got one to play with, I'm
not sure how much of it I can share so we'll go with what I
recall. I did get the kind of feedback that suggested the
company was going to fix things identified, which is always a
good sign.

The list of recommendations was quite long, but all software
related (apart from a comment on the boxes being rather BIG my
modern standards, important if you are paying for rackspace by
the inch, they are very solid boxes physically) so they may have
implemented some or all of those recommendations by now. I know
some were already in the next software release by the time I'd
finished the review.

I remember many of my DNS related concerns resolved around lack
of focus on TTL, and related time settings, and import
mechanisms (some ISPs will want some automation on these
things).

The GUI had some idiosyncratic choices of components, and I
couldn't find sensible backup mechanisms for configuration data,
similarly roll back of changes was very limited, although it was
good at reporting change history.

They had apparently done a good job from a network security
point of view, as far as I could tell without taking a
screwdriver to the review box. The software maintenance approach
was excellent, and I suspect they have built an excellent
platform to produce other, and varied, dedicated appliances on.

Overall I didn't see a compelling value proposition for would-be
buyers at the time, although it showed great potential. Given
the time elapsed since my review I think it is probably worth
reviewing if you want a solid combined DHCP/DNS box, and don't
want to be *nix administrators, or want to keep *nix admin time
down to a minimum (like you pay for admin by the hour).

I only had a minimal contact with support through other channels
during the review, so can't comment on the softer aspects of the
company.

I guess if you already have good *nix skills in-house they
probably already built your DNS, and DHCP services and you
wouldn't be asking.


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