[Infrastructures] RCS/CVS

[Eric Sorenson]

On Wed, 15 Jun 2005, Pete Ehlke wrote:

> People still edit live zone files by hand? Madness.
> 
> I mean, this is a special case of a generic problem- configuration data
> should always be generated by a reliable process that reads a simple
> canonical source and writes syntactically correct configs- but of all
> things, DNS zone files are a plain nightmare to maintain by hand. It's
> just too damn easy to forget a trailing . somewhere, incorrectly
> increment serial numbers, hork up the value of $ORIGIN... Even Vixie
> tells people to let perl generate their zone files:
> 
> http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/2005-04/msg00300.html

Further, in campus-LAN environments, DNS is one half (or maybe a 
third) of a generic problem: serving up useful information about 
hosts over the network. The other half is DHCP service, and to my mind 
there really ought to be a clean way to pull these together
with one backend, like:

        hostname        ip address      mac address
DNS         X               X
DHCP                        X               X

and either have the daemons query the backend directly or generate 
configs out of it. But all the functional prior art I've found along 
these lines is commercial (Lucent VitalQIP, Cisco CDDM) and/or goes way 
overboard with shoehorning lots of additional stuff in there (CMU's 
NetReg springs immediately to mind). 

Anybody got a nice middle-ground solution along these lines?

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