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?

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

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.

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, ...