Hi Martyn,
> Does anyone use smbind on their BQ boxes?
>
> If so, did you experience any 'issues'?
smbind is a PHP based tool to administer Bind nameserver entries.
So yeah, there will be conflicts:
The DNS GUI for BlueQuartz rewrites the DNS entries entirely every time you
use the DNS management and commit a change.
So if you use smbind, you better not touch the DNS modules built into the
BlueQuartz GUI, or it will overwrite any changes that you made through
smbind.
Another alternative instead of smbind and Bind:
MyDNS and MyDNSconfig.
MyDNS is a small DNS server which stores the DNS records in a MySQL database.
Sounds silly? It ain't so.
It's fast, pretty secure (use the Debian modified sources for it, as they have
some nice patches for it), but doesn't do recursion (i.e.: it only resolves
domains / IPs that you have records for). It can be tied into another working
DNS server to do recursive lookups, though.
MyDNSconfig is a PHP driven application that can be used to administer the
MySQL based DNS records.
One of the very big benefits of MyDNS is: As the DNS records are stored in
MySQL, you can use live MySQL database replication to replicate the DNS
records between different DNS servers. Or you can directly tie multiple MyDNS
servers into the same MySQL database server, but that is of course less
redundant.
Regardless if you use a single MySQL database server for storage, or multiple
MySQL servers with automatic database replication: All your DNS servers
always have identical records. If you ever need to add, change or delete DNS
records, then you have to do that only once and all your DNS servers will
have the same info right away.
Also: Backing up or restoring DNS records is as simple as doing a mysqldump or
restoring one.
At the worst your MySQL records can be edited directly with phpMyAdmin as
well, which is nice for mass IP address changes and therelike.
I have a package for BlueQuartz that installs MyDNS and MyDNSconfig in one go
and also disables the onboard Bind on a BlueQuartz. Aside from myself a few
clients of mine are using it as well and it has saved them quite a few
hassles in their DNS management.
--
With best regards,
Michael Stauber