Organizing Your DNS?

Neil Watson asks: "In previous organizations I've kept track of IPs, hostnames and DNS entries by using a single hosts file. I used a script (h2n) to convert the hosts file to DNS entries (BIND). Thus, all information was available in a single text file. For Microsoft Active Directory servers, we had that system's DNS server simply forward all of its requests to the BIND server. Now, I find myself at another organization. This network is considerably larger, with more name servers. The control of IPs, hostnames and DNS entries is somewhat loose, and it is starting take its toll. How do you organize all of your DNS information in order to easily assign and track all of the entries?"

Comments

PowerDNS

[bmac83]

You can use PowerDNS and any number of administrative tools to manage the domains with a SQL database rather than flat text files.

1. Consolidate Authority - 2. Install a frontend

[jgaynor]

It seems to me that most of your problems can be solved with a little politcal weight-throwing.

This network is considerably larger, with more name servers. The control of IPs, hostnames and DNS entries is somewhat loose, and it is starting take its toll.

The number of nameservers is irrelevant as long as they're master/slave. Are each of these NS boxen run by a different business unit/department? If so, find the group with the organizational proponency for DNS (probably you) and demand that they be given full control. Assign a hostmaster for your organization and funnel ANY and ALL dns changes through him/her/it. Authority for subdomains can still be given out, but force a signed waiver to cover your ass when they shoot themselves in the foor by running 2k3 AD as a production NS service.

Once this is done you'll probably want to ditch the flat-file approach and run some sort of frontend. It guarantees that when your hostmaster eventually quits you wont have to find another expensive geek. I used to run the webmin plugin for BIND, but stopped once I saw what a security nightmare webmin was. Don't have much experience with anything else besides custom solutions but nictool and oDNS have their supporters.

Ganymede, Doctor DNS

[jonabbey]

We have been using our own software, Ganymede, to handle our DNS for the last 7 years. Ganymede is a programmable directory mastering application.. you give it a schema with objects for real-world items such as systems, interfaces, networks, etc., and Ganymede provides an object database and concurrent client/server GUI for making changes. Whenever an administrator hits 'commit' in their client, Ganymede turns around and updates the DNS (and in our case, our NIS, our Active Directory, our DHCP, and more) on a background thread.

The schema we use for managing DNS at ARL:UT is not the most flexible, in that we have only a single DNS domain that we are managing, and may well not fit your environment, however there is a consulting company in Germany, http://www.fg-networking.de/, which has built a complete DNS and DHCP management solution around Ganymede. They are using it to manage the DNS and DHCP for a University of 14,000 hosts, and they might be able to help you out with your environment.

If you do decide you might like to know more about Ganymede, let me know.. I've been working on it for the last couple of years for internal use and for clients, without posting any new releases on our website. The software has tons of improvements that have been made in the meantime.

Re:Ganymede, Doctor DNS

[jonabbey]

Ganymede 2.0 uses SSL for all client-server communications, as well as digitally signing the applets. It also requires Java 1.4 or better, largely in order to support SSL.

Ganymede supports roles, so that you can give certain administrators arbitrarily reduced privileges. If you've got people who need to have limited privileges as you describe, it's possible to grant them in Ganymede, if the powers that be permit it.

May I ask if you work at ARL:UT?

A little more info would have helped..

[tinkertim]

Would love to help you, but not sure if these are all internal domains? mixed? How are the zones organized now?

I use a single system image cluster (A small Xen virtualized one) with my own little sqlite concoction to keep track of what is soa for what. This lets me easily shift things around with a back end I wrote using PHP5.

I have 2 machines, each has 7 nodes (1 director and 6 real nodes) each with 128 MB allocated to it. This gives me failover, load balancing and the convenience of the single system image without the hassles of nfs breaking, and no trust relationships to hassle with.

I have each node running a seperate config, with CVIP running directing queries from the Internet to the 2 nodes SOA for the domain as seen from the outside world.

This lets me put each node on a different network, but using only 1 nic (I should use 2 but I'm cheap) per machine. I really didn't *need* the admin back end, (grep works wonders so does find) but it makes things simple.

I also haven't had a 3AM wake up due to a DNS outage in quite a while :) Total cost :

2 P4 HT's, 4 SATA drives, and about 12 hours of time to set it up. No single point of failure either :)

Sounds like you're in a bowl of spaghetti .. I'd tame it soon before you get blamed for the previous guy's lack of effort.

HTH :)

How many hosts?

[bernywork]

If you were able to manage out of a single hosts file before, then you would have been looking after a small organisation.

I find that even up to 1500 hosts, managing IP addresses out of a spreadsheet is fine. The amount of times that admins actually connect machines to networks isn't all that often (with the exception of workstations, but use dynamic DNS for that and don't worry about putting them into a spreadsheet) so the changes are minimal.

Get the solarwinds software if you are running Windows (or find a box to put it on) and in the engineers edition, there is a DNS auditing tool. Run that every now and again to make sure that what's in the spreadsheet and what's in DNS matches up and all is good.

If you are looking above 1500 hosts, then you might need to consider some of the other posts above.

I found in the past as long as your IP allocations are easily managable, and you know what it is that you want to manage, then it's all good.

Berny

Extend the hosts file metaphor

[Zocalo]

You don't say how many domains you are dealing with, but unless it's something obscene then getting all your zones to include one "gold" server on their NS list is a good start. The zone files themselves then provide all the IP information you might need on the hosts, especially if you also include HINFO or TXT records for your hosts. Ideally this would be the SOA for all the domains, and not used for anything other than acting as authoritive DNS for secondaries that would handle the actual queries although if you are delegating administration on subdomains that might not be practical. Note that on BIND (and presumably other DNS servers), your listed "authoritive" DNS servers, including the SOA if you wish, can actually be slaves to a "hidden" server or servers that only they can query, which can be very useful in designing a management structure.

Depending on how many people are updating the zones, what kind of security you need on that, and how many zones you actually have then start looking at GUI/web based frontends and database backends. Personally, I'd try and assign a few designated hostmasters to administer all DNS changes centrally, but if that meets objection and you don't have or can't get enough weight to overrule it it's not a major problem. There are plenty of quite decent web based GUIs out there to interface with the zone files directly or things like SQL and LDAP based backends, pretty much all of the better ones allow you to apply access control somewhere in the implementatation. If you are considering a database based backend though, be very careful about your selection and implementation if there are any dynamic zones (especially Active Directory, since you mention Windows) in the mix!

Infoblox

[austad]

Infoblox is a great product for doing this. It's all appliance based, runs Bind (Cricket Liu works for them), and basically everything operates as a grid. I've done a couple of installs of this for clients, and it's a very slick system.

Re:Infoblox

[ChristopherCain]

I've found that Infoblox isn't at all cracked up to what they claim to be. From my experience, BlueCat Networks' Adonis DNS/DHCP server kicks ass over anything from Infoblox in ease of management and reliability. As well, BlueCat's technical support is the greatest I have ever dealt with.

BlueCat has another product called the Proteus that handles IP Address Management. We have found that with multiple locations distributed throughout the world, something like this may greatly help us keep a tighter control of our networks.

I'm not trying to knock Infoblox, I have happened to use both companies products in my carrer and prefer BlueCats better.

Think outside the box

[SeeMyNuts!]

You should update your information architecture to send client DNS resolution requests via your postal service. Employ a small number of columnar mapping table lookup experts to enscribe the proper domain names onto the request sheets and transfer them back to the clients, again via post mail. You should realize the desired sea change in support staff utilization within weeks.

IPplan

[lucm]

Here is a nice web-based solution: http://iptrack.sourceforge.net/

We are using it at the office and it is very handy.

There is a lot of features, including DNS management, search tools, routing tables management, ...

MyDNS Rocks

[pyite69]

We have hundreds of thousands of domains and millions of A, PTR, MX records. It is quite manageable with MyDNS. It uses a MySQL database with two simple tables - one for the domains and one for the address information.

It makes multiple name servers easier because you don't need to AXFR - you just use MySQL replication which is quite easy to deal with.

Nictool

[LogicX]

Nictool is an excellent DNS management system which uses mysql as a backend, rsync/ssh to update djbdns servers, and has a web frontend with very granular delegation to different users.

I've been using it for many many months on multiple DNS setups, and many other organizations use it also. It takes a bit of knowledge to setup, but is very reliable once its setup. I've written a few guides on configuration and installation (though now a little outdated) -- they can be found in the mail toaster forum.

Re:Have you considered LDAP?

[mr_jrt]

I run ldap2dns and unfortunatly (or not, as pertains to your viewpoint), the author believes dyndns isn't fundamentally a good idea, as DNS is a resolver, and thus shouldn't have write access to the DB. Which does kind of make sense from a security standpoint, as DHCP is never externally facing whilst DNS is far more likely to be. Still, it causes me no end of pain as I haven't found a DHCP server that will update my LDAP...and I haven't got the faintest idea where to begin hacking ISC's dhcpd.