bind on bluecat's adonis 1000

[Brad Knowles]

At 9:25 AM -0400 2005-09-15, Greg Chavez wrote:

>  I was also blushing at how transparent your earlier "Questions you
>  should ask of a DNS Appliance" effort was.  All Infoblox, all the
>  time.

	Hey, it's good stuff.  I only recommend products that I know and 
trust, from companies I know and trust.  However, I've got several 
different products that I can recommend to people, of which Infoblox 
is one.

>  They plan to support views.  The current version (3.1rc6) does not.

	Mine does.  Are you sure you've got the latest firmware?  Have 
you talked to your sales rep as to when the next firmware revision 
will come out?

>  Infoblox is minus many of the features and fine-tuning controls of
>  BIND 9.2.4.  They may exist somewhere in the bowels of the code, but
>  they are not available in the management interface.  I suspect much of
>  this is on purpose - appliances probably should appeal to those
>  without the desire or resources to tinker much.

	They definitely work to make the appliance as easy to monitor and 
manage as possible, and they're working on interfaces to expose more 
of the internal capabilities of the software in a user-friendly way, 
through the monitoring/management interface.

	This kind of approach is critical when you're managing a large 
network of these things.  Just precisely what else would you expect 
an appliance vendor to do?  Ship you the parts and let you do it for 
yourself?

>                                                      *IF* this
>  clustering feature works as advertised, multiple appliances can be
>  effortlessly inserted into an existing environment with virtually
>  identical configurations.

	From what I've seen, it works as advertised.

>  I forget what version its *based* on, but it's very recent.  However,
>  it's probably been bent and reduced to their will, possibly enough to
>  make it qualify as more of an ersatz BIND, much in the way other
>  appliances bend and reduce BSD and Linux.

	Uh, no.  It's absolutely plain-vanilla BIND, albeit configured to 
support threading because they've got two Opteron processors in the 
box and the OS supports threading and locking in a way that is 
efficient and fits well with the BIND model.

>  This Java GUI of which you speak is the major weakness of the product.
>  It is, at times, prohibitively slow.

	The only time I've seen it be "slow" is a result of my ancient 
Apple PowerBook G3/400 "Pismo" laptop that just can't execute Java 
code very quickly.  Today, I popped in a G4/550 upgrade module, and 
we'll see how much faster it is.  Certainly, everything else I do 
seems much faster, and I imagine that I'll see a similar benefit for 
Java.

	I can't imagine that a more recent "console server" would have 
any performance problems at all.

>                                         The worst part is they way the
>  GUI "exits".  There is no log-off button.  Instead, you must exit your
>  browser completely to reconnect.  This is so annoying, I can barely
>  stop myself from foaming at the mouth as I type this paragraph.

	I have seen some user interface issues that I'm going to be 
talking to them about, and I won't mince words when it comes to 
talking about them publicly, if they don't get them fixed pretty soon.

	However, I haven't had it for long, and I haven't had that much 
opportunity to work with it.  I'm going to hold off judgement for a 
little while, until I get more experience with it.

>  Infoblox is very receptive to these complaints though, and I predict
>  that they will start making more and more concessions to half-baked
>  BIND-geeks like myself as the versions march by.  You should also note
>  that Infoblox contains more than one BIND emeritus on their payroll.
>  Their influence can't help but rub off.

	I've known Cricket for years.  He's always been one of the 
smartest guys I've ever talked to, and he's introduced me to some 
good companies and products over that time.  Certainly, the company 
has been very responsive so far, and I fully expect that things will 
work out pretty quickly.

>  Here, here.  Test.  *THEN* tell us how it works.  Corporate Web sites
>  and marketing brochures and those who read from them are about as
>  accurate as my shoe.

	I am testing.  I haven't pulled any punches when it comes to 
products I've worked with in the past, and I'm not about to start now.

-- 
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.