$Id: announcement.txt,v 1.3 2008/07/08 18:23:25 joeym Exp $

7/08/2008 (update) ---

I've created 1 more "new" writer -- contrib::writers::bindzone.

It is mostly identical to the original binddlz::writers::bindzone, except that it changes the format of the zone file output slightly (primarily the SOA record).

I found in my testing that the original bindzone writer was not creating the SOA records in a way that was understandable by BIND 9.5.0.  The new writer works fine with BIND 9.5.0 (at least in my environment =)

I've rolled this update into my previous patchset here:  http://joeym.net/bind-dlz-patches/bind-dlz-jmiller.patch
Or the full tarball:  http://joeym.net/bind-dlz-patches/DLZPerfTools-1.1-jmiller-contrib.tar.gz


6/24/2008 (original) --

Hello all,

I hope I am posting to the right list.  If not, please let me know if there
is a better place to post.

Recently I found myself benchmarking a variety of authoritative DNS servers, 
but quickly became frustrated at the amount of time I was spending on 
creating large amounts of 'random' DNS data in formats suitable for each.
Luckily, I found the excellent dnsDataGen.pl tool, which helped tremendously.

I decided to create some new 'writers' that were particularly 
relevant to my benchmarking efforts and I thought I should share them 
with the world in case they are able to help someone else someday.

The patches can be found here:  http://www.joeym.net/

A summary of the changes:

- Slight modification to dnsDataGen.pl itself so that it always creates 
the SOA record first when creating a new zone.  This was helpful for 
the writers I created because many of them build a set of commands to 
feed into various SQL DB.s which require that the zone exists before 
records can be added to it.

- The following new writers (I created a new directory called
"contrib/writers" to store these, as recommend on the bind-dlz website):
  -- contrib::writers::mydns::file
  -- contrib::writers::powerdns::xdb
  -- contrib::writers::powerdns::sqlite3
  -- contrib::writers::powerdns::gmysql
  -- contrib::writers::windowsdns::file

These should each be fairly self-explanatory for the most part if you're
familiar with MyDNS, PowerDNS, and Windows DNS.  Mostly they just create
SQL files that can be directly imported into mysql
(ie: cat file |mysql dbname).

The Windows DNS writer creates a batch file that calls "dnscmd" to create
records in Active Directory.  I.ve only tested this writer with
AD-integrated zones, but it may work for other zone types too.

 The PowerDNS XDB writer's output is intended to be fed into the
'xdb-fill' tool that comes with PowerDNS.

Everything is wrapped up in 1 patch file, available at
http://www.joeym.net/bind-dlz-patches/bind-dlz-jmiller.patch

I've only tested each of these for basic functionality, so I cannot
guarantee they'll work with all versions or in all scenarios, but so
far they have been a big time-saver for the various benchmarking 
I've been doing.

I'm not sure if maintenance is still being done on BIND-DLZ, 
dnsDataGen.pl, or the DLZPerfTools.  If so, and these patches are 
useful, feel free to include them in a future release.  I will attempt
to maintain them on my own webserver as long as possible.

Thanks,
Joe