DNS Management

[Ray Buschur]

I support a large customer that uses Nortel's NetID product.  My customer is
currently licensed to manage 1,000,000 IPs world wide.  The NetID product
team has (and continues to) add features that make it feasible to manage a
very large organization's DNS & DHCP data in a very nice way.

Our configuration allows domain/network/DHCP managers to do what they need
too.  From time to time, this requires someone to change how they do things
every now and then, but generally it is working out.  We centrally control
the configuration of the DNS server (about 50-75 operational now, and the
number is growing).  It is a BIND based product, with Nortel enhancements,
that we like...the enhancements are transparent to any other DNS server.

I will say that my customer has managed to resolve the coordination issues,
even when somewhere someone is in prime time.

the project looked at several other commercial products, pure BIND, and even
briefly considered custom code (that was really brief though).

ray

-----Original Message-----
From: kcd at daimlerchrysler.com [mailto:kcd at daimlerchrysler.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2000 8:12 PM
To: Bind Users
Subject: Re: DNS Management


Keith Donaldson wrote:

> I'm curious to know what folks are using to manage DNS.  I'm
> particularly interested in sites that manage a large number of domains
> and are constantly make modifications to zone files and such.  Are you
> using an open source solution that is working well for you?

We have at least 3 homegrown maintenance systems in use here, one of
which (ITM's) I wrote from scratch, and one of which (Engineering's) was
originally based on the University of Utah stuff and then heavily
modified. Engineering seems mostly happy with their system, as are we
with ours. We're also evaluating/piloting a couple of the commercial
packages, especially with an eye towards DHCP/DNS integration. One big
problem we are now facing (since we've gotten a lot bigger in recent
years) is trying to co-ordinate the maintenance activities of widely
disparate organizations, using different tools, sharing the same
namespaces, especially reverse mappings for shared subnets. I haven't
seen any open-source packages *or* commercial products that really handle
this elegantly; most of them seem to assume that they are the center of
the DNS universe and Thou Shalt Have No Other...


- Kevin