bind on bluecat's adonis 1000

[Brad Knowles]

At 9:36 PM -0700 2005-09-05, Gok Buanguro wrote:

>  Hello, does anyone know what version of BIND on the
>  latest Adonis 1000 DNS/DHCP Server appliance. Their
>  website says its 9.x.

	They may not tell you.  It may be that no one outside the company 
knows.  But you can always use a "fingerprint" tool like fpdns to see 
what you've got.

>                                       I'm comparing
>  adonis with other dns server on the market, figuring
>  out which is better.

	The version of BIND that is shipped is only one factor to 
compare.  There's a whole host of other issues to be concerned about.

	For example, how easy is it to install and integrate into your 
network?  Do they have a concept of a cluster member and cluster 
master server, and multiple different groups of clusters, so that you 
can manage your entire network of appliances from one machine?

	When you bring in a new box, what does it take to get it up and 
running?  Can you just configure the IP and MAC addresses into the 
cluster master, then assign the box to be a particular member of a 
particular cluster, and then just plug the thing in and it will 
handle everything else?

	Do they do high-availability fail-over with a standard protocol 
like VRRP?  Do they have a separate out-of-band administrative 
interface that can be used, if you choose?

	Do they have a shared distributed database for storing all data 
and meta-data, and how is that backed up?  If you have hundreds of 
thousands of zones and forty or fifty appliances, how large is that 
backup?  Is it measured in tens of MB, or is it measured in tens or 
hundreds of GB?

	How easy is it to upgrade the OS?  Can you just point and click 
to a file with your web browser, and have that uploaded to the 
cluster master, and then automatically distributed to all cluster 
members?  Once the upgrade is in place, do they have a mechanism for 
doing rolling reboots, so that no more than one machine is down at a 
given point in time?  Do they allow you to configure the rolling 
reboot schedule?

	If need be, can you configure the box from the LCD and buttons on 
the front panel, as well as the cisco-like command-line interface, as 
well as the web-based GUI?  Do they give you a cross-platform 
application that you can install on your workstation, so that you can 
quickly and easily go into the admin GUI without necessarily always 
having to fire up your web browser?


	There's a whole host of other questions you want to ask.  These 
are just the ones I can come up with in a couple of minutes, 
off-the-top-of-my-head.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.