BIND Based Appliances.

[Dawn Connelly]

Oh, I forgot to mention the main reason we went with Bluecat rather than
Infoblox- Command Line Access baby! With Infoblox you only had access to
their watered down CLI. With Bluecat you had full access via SSH. That came
in handy more times that I care to recount. If I'm going to be responsible
for managing a box, I want to have access to all the tools that box has, not
just the ones the vendors deems stupid proof. When troubleshooting an issue,
I could SSH to the box and look at the files that I needed, change the
logging to whatever I wanted, run tcpdumps, everything. With Infoblox that
was not an option. Had there been a NIC setting problem with the Infoblox
device, there wouldn't have been jack I could do about it. With Bluecat I
could actually fix the problem without having to wait for a solution to be
developed, tested, packaged and shipped out.
Okay, I'll stop now. :)

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 12:01 PM, Dawn Connelly <dawn.connelly at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Google for President
> YouTube for VP
> in any year divisible by 4
>
>


-- 
Google for President
YouTube for VP
in any year divisible by 4