DNS Magic: keeping DNS under control

DNSMagic is now FreeWare to celebrate the upcoming release of BIND 9.3

Our DNS Magic setup for DNS servers can greatly improve the reliability of DNS. These tools and procedures are the result of many years experience in running DNS systems large and small.

Benefits

The goals of DNS Magic are to automate those aspects of DNS management that humans tend to get wrong, while retaining maximum flexibility.

The benefits of the DNS Magic setup are:

Using make(1) to handle dependencies ensures that zone file serial numbers are always updated when needed and not otherwise.
Loading named(8) from a tree that is not used for editing, ensures partial changes will never be loaded.
Using CVS pre-commit checks to verify DNS data before accepting changes ensures that DNS data is acceptable to named(8).
Revision control of DNS data allows changes to be easily backed out.
Coordinated support for automated (batch) processing can greatly reduce the manual effort required.

Combining DNS Magic with a request management tool such as req can greatly ease the pain of running a busy DNS.

See here for additional information.

Requirements

While we have shell and perl versions of many of the components of DNS Magic, the supported version requires perl and CVS 1.9 or later.

Availability

DNS Magic is now freely avaliable as DNSMagic.cpio.gz which is designed to be unpacked under our configs tree.

A standalone distribution of DNSMagic is not yet available.

Support

Yes we can provide support, but it is not included in the purchase price. Once a site is setup there should be very little support needed and depending on the level of experience available at the site with perl, cvs and of course DNS, the level of support needed during migration to DNS Magic will vary greatly.

We can do the mirgration step for you - provided you can provide secure (eg ssh) root access to a box running the same OS as your primary nameserver - so that we can ensure that CVS, perl and bind (we recommend bind-8) are all setup ok and with a copy of your DNS data so that we can populate the CVS repository. We can do this, but we'll be charging USD $250 per hour. Depending on the link speed and reliability, and the platform involved it might take several hours, so budget for another USD $1000.