BIND Based Appliances.

[Dawn Connelly]

My best advice is to FULLY test the appliances before you buy then. Sure,
appliances limits the stupid people headache, but they introduce a bunch
more headaches that you had no idea were coming. Infoblox sales people are
VERY aggressive from what I have seen. Use that to your advantage. Make them
do a bake off so you can really see what you are buying and make sure that
bake off reflects the scale of your environment- not just the functionality.
The Bluecat guys aren't nearly as cut throat but they seem to be a good
group of folks to work with. If you are looking at buying a big enough
environment, they'll send some Canadian down to do a bake off. Make the
vendor early their paycheck.
I had a similar situation. My personal preference was BIND on Solaris but
because the user base didn't have the necessary skill set to make that
option viable, I *had* to look appliances. We evaluated three- GTM by F5
networks, Infoblox and Bluecat. GTM wasn't scalable for what we needed so
was out of the race pretty quickly. Infoblox- there were some fundamental
issues that we had that knocked them out. Those issues might be resolved by
now though. It was how the named process was handled. Any time you made any
changes to the named.conf file, it would stop and start the named
process...rather than leveraging rndc commands. That meant that there would
be a rolling blackout in the environment. That's really a non-issue is small
or medium environments, but with thousands of zones, the boxes would be
effectly down for almost two minutes at a time. Not okay. Also the fact that
the database was home grown rather than a standard database platform. If we
ever had to do a restore on a non-infoblox device we would have been SOL.
Like someone else mentioned, there is a compromise between ease of use and
functionality. The compromise on Infoblox was more than I was willing to
give up. We opted for Bluecat in the end. That being said, I wouldn't
exactly be a person they would list as a reference. We had NUMEROUS problems
with their appliances. The major ass biter was the fact that the database
replication between the management servers would periodically just die...and
would have no awareness that it was dead. Deployments would get hung pretty
frequently. The named process on the DNS appliances would die periodically
for no known reason. The solution more often than not was to reboot the
boxes. Even things like the fact that they are using an old Linux kernel
that has problems with forgetting the NIC setting upon reboot. I ended up
having to put a script that would run at boot to hard set the NIC. One thing
I will say for Bluecat is that if you can make a good argument for a needed
feature, you'll get that feature.


On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 6:36 AM, Linux Addict <linuxaddict7 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Folks, I am looking to re-architecture our NS Infrastructure. Can you
> guys suggest me if there are any Bind-Based Appliances available and
> authorized by ISC itself?
>
> Thanks, LA
>
>
>
>


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