Building a Dynamic DNS Server for Your Enterprise?

Biff98 asks: "We manage thousands of hostnames for field gear with DynDNS.org. It's always been our intention of configuring our own DDNS server and bring it in-house. Given the recent DynDNS outage due to a DDOS attack, resulting in the inability to resolve names for multiple days, there has been 'encouragement' from management to move forward on bringing DDNS in-house. Here's the problem: I can't find any easy-to-use, scalable software to accomplish this task! BIND doesn't scale well, and I don't consider MintDNS an option due to the required platform (Windows Server w/ AD & IIS). Has anyone out there solved this problem before?"

Comments

BIND does not scale???

[WindBourne]

Exactly what do you think runs the bulk of the internet? That is like saying Linux or Solaris or sendmail do not scale well.

Re:BIND does not scale???

[Spazmania]

Bind's implementation of dynamic dns is... funky at best. It syncs changes to disk infrequently and unpredictably, and it does so by rewriting the entire zone file in the same format as it uses for secondaried zones so that any comments or other organization in the affected file is lost. The security is also relatively coarse: the tools don't allow a particular security key to apply to a particular name -- the key applies to a whole zone. If you have a large number of devices and want to tightly constrict update access, that poses a scalability problem as you need one zone per device.

Dyndns is likely using Bind at the back end, but they've built another layer of security and management on top of it. Biff98 is looking for software that does the whole job out of the box.

Re:BIND does not scale???

[Just Some Guy]

The security is also relatively coarse: the tools don't allow a particular security key to apply to a particular name -- the key applies to a whole zone.

BIND9 addresses this with update-policy which can map an individual TSIG key to a specific name (or subdomain or wildcard). You can say that "key 'laptop23.example.com.' can update an A record with the same name".

I won't disagree about the dynamic zone file ugliness. I usually put dynamic hosts in their own subdomain so that my main zone file can remain nicely human-friendly. For example, we'd use ".mobile.example.com" and put it in its own zone file. The file for ".example.com" will still be nice, and if every record in ".mobile.example.com" is dynamic, who cares if it's a machine-generated mess?

PowerDNS

[PsyQo]

Why don't you give PowerDNS a try?

It has an authoritive component and a recursive one, both work extremely well and are in use by some big companies, as well as the Wikipedia and the .TK TLD.
As for flexibility: PowerDNS uses backends to retrieve its zone data, so you can use one that's already available (MySQL, BIND zone files, SQLite, ODBC, etc.) or write one yourself.

Oh and it's opensource :)

BIND doesn't scale well

[JackHoffman]

BIND does indeed not scale well. Down, that is.

PowerDNS

[JerkBoB]

http://www.powerdns.com/

I used it when I was running an ISP a few years ago. Used a replicated MySQL backend behind three authoritative servers. Also used dnscache for recursors in front of all the customers.

All your zone data is stored in DB tables, so it's easy to hack together a frontend, or integrate with CRM or whatever. I wish Rails had existed back then for all the CRUD that I wrote by hand. :/