RE: [Nolug] DNS/Reverse Lookup and a Host file.

I think I've got most of the problem resolved, but it is goofy so hopefully
someone can benefit.

We have a management/monitoring station running HP Openview that's managed
my a contractor that supports all our routers for the company (550+). They
maintain a host file on that station (NT4) to assist in resolving the names
of the routers. We were not interested in having all that data in DNS. I
brought up a new DNS server on Linux running BIND and it's been running
flawlessly (probably because nobody knows how to mess it up!). Now they
wanted me to take that host file and import that data into DNS nightly.
Internally we have two domains and old one we are migrating from
(stewartenterprises.com) and the new one we are migrating to (stei.com).
These records need to be consistent across both domains, and the reverse
lookup.

Solution (not totally implemented yet)
I have an event run at night that copies that host file from the NT system
to a samba share on the DNS server. From that file I have a cron job that
copies that to /etc/hosts. There is a utility that is downloadable from the
Oreilly ftp site called h2n. This will parse the hosts file rearrange it so
it's readable by BIND, however it overwrites the file that was previously
there and I need to share it between two domains. It outputs db.stei and
db.10 which are the two files I need with the data db.stei is the DNS data
for the routers and db.10 is the data for the reverse. I included in the
stei.com.hosts and the stewartenterprises.com.hosts files the $INCLUDE
db.stei and in the 10.in-addr.arpa $INCLUDE db.10 and this seems to work. It
also doesn't seem interfere with the dynamic DNS updates but I'm still
testing that.

I was probably early in asking for help, but I really had no clue how to
begin doing this. If anyone sees any improvements I can make to this feel
free to let me know.
Thomas

-----Original Message-----
From: Dustin Puryear [mailto:dpuryear@usa.net]
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2003 7:54 PM
To: nolug@joeykelly.net
Subject: Re: [Nolug] DNS/Reverse Lookup and a Host file.

I'll be honest and say I'm kind of confused on the host file issue. Does
each host file specify all of the hosts that should belong in each zone
file? Better yet, can you quickly walk through an actual example of what
you are trying to do? Not a script (or you wouldn't be asking), but what is
in the host file and what you want to end up with.

At 08:53 AM 4/4/2003 -0600, you wrote:

>Let me spell out the problem first.
>
>I have DNS and the Reverse lookup configured properly and it's working.
>Actually it working so well I need to expand it's functionality to include
>all routers in our network. The routers are maintained by a contractor and
>when modifications are made they modify a host file. Pretty simple so far.
>I need to copy that host file from the NT system to my Linux box every
night
>(done), include those records in the DNS files and make sure the reverse
>lookup is working also (again nightly/not done). Now I need to make sure
>that it's copied to two separate DNS domains. (The reverse only for one)
and
>I'm also (trying to) using dynamic DNS.
>I'm hoping someone knows how or has done this already. There are scripts
>mentioned in the Oreilly book DNS & BIND that are available for download,
>but my copy is at home. That link would help a whole lot. Any suggestions
>about how I should tackle this would be great, before I reinvent the wheel.
>Thanks
>
>Thomas Wimprine
>Network Administrator
>504.729.1495
>
>___________________
>Nolug mailing list
>nolug@nolug.org

---
Dustin Puryear <dustin@puryear-it.com>
Puryear Information Technology
Windows, UNIX, and IT Consulting
http://www.puryear-it.com
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