Ganymede, Anyone?

[Jonathan Abbey]

Hi there.  I'm the primary designer and author of Ganymede, hope you
don't mind if I comment.

We at ARL:UT are using Ganymede to manage our DNS, but we have a
fairly restricted DNS environment.  We have a single DNS domain and
our IP networking is basically a big chunk of Class C-sized subnets
that we allocate IP addresses out of.  For us, Ganymede works great,
but then again, I've spent a great deal of time writing the Ganymede
customization code that supports our environment.

As you'll see if you read the Ganymede FAQ, Ganymede is more a
comprehensive network metadirectory than it is a specifically
targetted DNS tool.  Right now, if you want to use Ganymede to manage
DNS, you'll either have to invent your own database schema, plug-in
classes, and back-end scripting, or you'll have to adapt the DNS logic
and code that we use at ARL for our single DNS domain and bag of 8 bit
IP subnetworks.

Brian O'Mara here at ARL is finishing up work on a set of scripts that
can convert data from BIND zone files into XML files and vice-versa.
The idea is that with an appropriate schema definition and custom
plug-ins, the Ganymede server will be able to directly import BIND
data using XML, and when changes are made, the Ganymede server will
turn around and write an XML file out, which an external Perl script
will convert into BIND zone files, updating only those zones that need
to be updated.

There are only a couple of us working on the code at ARL, so the
progress has been slow.  Brian's been working on the code for the
DNS<->XML conversion for nearly a year now, and the Perl code he has
to do this work is solid.  We will have broad DNS support in Ganymede,
but the speed of development will depend in significant part on
whether folks outside of ARL are interested enough to lend a hand on
the work.

If you're interested in what DNS management with Ganymede is going to
look like, you can read

http://www.arlut.utexas.edu/~omara/xmldocs/docs.html 

for an in-progress discussion of how it's all going to fit together.

| Has anyone tried using Ganymede to manage DNS? How well does this work?
| 
| Thanks!