RE: Bind9 + db(any) + split dns (views)

Hi Jim,
=20
Thanks for your response. Sorry for the ambiguity, we would be providing
a web-based GUI for clients to be able to access/update the zone data,
and not ssh access to the database.

We had thought about doing other things, (i.e. script calls script calls
script) I'd like to investigate what all would be involved in setting up
a database backend to bind. Are you (or anyone) aware of any resources
that might offer some further light on how to go about doing it?=20

Regards,
Ben Habing

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Reid [mailto:jim@rfc1035.com]=20
Sent: July 21, 2004 11:26 AM
To: Ben Habing
Cc: bind-users@isc.org
Subject: Re: Bind9 + db(any) + split dns (views)=20

>>>>> "Ben" =3D=3D Ben Habing <bhabing@genesysnetworks.com> writes:

Ben> Does anyone have any experience with setting up bind9 with a
Ben> db backend? Good or bad?

Ben> The main reason we want to have a db is we are going to be
Ben> giving client access to edit zones, and sign up for new or
Ben> transfer existing domains. And if I told them we'd be giving
Ben> them ssh access they'd say, "What's SSH?", "You mean I have
Ben> to type it?"

Your question doesn't seem to follow from the original premise. Your
users/can't won't use a command-line interface and are probably clueless
when it comes to DNS administration and the management of resource
records. So presumably you'll provide some sort of web-based GUI to take
care of that. What comes out of the back-end of that GUI should be
opaque to those users. It could be SQL that gets fed into some sort of
database, as you seem to be minded to do. The GUI output might be
Dynamic DNS updates. It could even be conventional zone files and
snippets of named.conf!

Introducing a database back-end to BIND9 could be a lot more work than
some of the other alternatives. I doubt the costs of using a database
back-end justify the (marginal) benefits. This might be useful whenever
there's huge amounts of data to manage: millions of resource records
and/or hundreds of thousands of zones. If the amount of data that will
be in your name servers isn't at that scale, a database back-end
probably isn't worth the effort.