Dynamic zones: some recommendations?

[Chris Boot]

Hi there,

I've been working on the design of a web-based server control panel,  
and now I'm working on the BIND/DNS Zones portion of the design. It  
strikes me that there are plenty of options that I could use to allow  
users to alter zones via the web. What I'm looking for are  
suggestions or recommendations as to what method might be best to use  
in the current environment. The options I've found so far are:

Plain old zone files
- Easy, extremely stable
- Can use lots of memory for lots of zones
- Could get out of sync with the backing database
- File permissions could get finicky

RDBMS-backed (MySQL or PostgreSQL)
- Immediate zone updates
- Very small memory footprint
- Requires recompiling BIND
- Still requires named.conf updates for adding/removing zones
- Wildcards appear not to be supported without hacking at the SDB  
backend

LDAP-backed
- As for RDBMS  plus:
- Somewhat inflexible schema that only allows a single TTL per label,  
as opposed to allowing one to have a separate TTL for every record

What do people use? Did I misunderstand any of the options? Any hints  
and tips?

I'm particularly wondering what people like DynDNS and other large  
DNS hosting outfits do to run their servers...

Many thanks,
Chris

-- 
Chris Boot
bootc at bootc.net
http://www.bootc.net/