dynamically updated zone and $GENERATE

[David Nolan]

--On Thursday, April 06, 2006 10:06:09 +0200 Daniel Vaillant 
<vaillant at ganil.fr> wrote:

> I am in the process to mix initially loaded (stticallydefined zones)
> and dynamic updates from various sources
> (text files under specific apps).
> I have the labour to write programs (scripts around nsupdates) for that.
> Is there any "pointers" on  such existing programs I could take as
> such or modify.


Your question is pretty light on details, so its hard to recommend a 
solution.  i.e. are you dealing with a couple zones, or a couple hundred? 
Are you dealing with a few dozen records, or several thousand?  Do you need 
a way to delegate zone management to multiple people, or will a single 
admin be responsible for changes?  Are you trying to mix static & dynamic 
updates in a single zone?  (Thats hard at best, and a really bad idea at 
worst...)

Do a search in freshmeat.net for DNS and you'll find quite a few tools for 
performing DNS management.  Which one you need depends on the details of 
your situation.

If your scale tends towards the larger end of the ranges I gave above, I 
recommend taking a look at Carnegie Mellon's NetReg, which you can find in 
freshmeat or at http://www.net.cmu.edu/netreg.  (Disclaimer: I'm the 
current primary developer, and I also offer installation, customization and 
support contracts on the side.)

It handles both static servers and dynamic servers (currently no mixing on 
a single server), and scales very well to large sites.  At Carnegie Mellon 
we have over 400 zones (not counting the reverses), and over 50K records in 
those zones.

(NetReg also maintains DHCP configurations, and has a SOAP API for advanced 
integration with other systems.)


-David Nolan
 Network Software Designer
 Computing Services
 Carnegie Mellon University