There are a few utilities available to ease the administration of zone files in the DNS.
Two common ones are h2n and makezones. Both are perl scripts. h2n is used to convert host tables into zone data files. It is available for anonymous ftp from
ftp.uu.net : /published/oreilly/nutshell/dnsbind/dns.tar.Z
makezones works from a single file that looks like a forward zone file, with some additional syntax for special cases. It is included in the current BIND distribution. The newest version is always available for anonymous ftp from
ftp.cus.cam.ac.uk : /pub/software/programs/DNS/makezones
bpp is a m4 macro package for pre-processing the master files bind uses to define zones. Information on this package may be found at http://www.meme.com/soft.
More information on various DNS related utilities may be found using the DNS Resources Directory
http://www.dns.net/dnsrd/.
Question 3.2. DIG - Domain Internet Groper
Date: Thu Dec 1 11:09:11 EST 1994
The latest and greatest, official, accept-no-substitutes version of
the Domain Internet Groper (DiG) is the one that comes with BIND.
Get the latest kit.
Question 3.3. DNS packet analyzer
Date: Mon Jun 15 21:42:11 EDT 1998
There is a free ethernet analyzer called Ethload available for PC's
running DOS. The latest filename is ETHLD200.ZIP. It understands lots
of protocols including TCP/UDP. It'll look inside there and display
DNS/BOOTP/ICMP packets etc. (Ed. note: something nice for someone to
add to tcpdump ;^) ). Depending on the ethernet controller it's given
it'll perform slightly differently. It handles NDIS/Novell/Packet
drivers. It works best with Novell's promiscuous mode drivers.
The current home page for Ethload is http://www.ping.be/ethload.
Question 3.4. host
Date: Sun Dec 4 21:15:38 EST 1994
A section from the host man page:
host looks for information about Internet hosts and domain
names. It gets this information from a set of intercon-
nected servers that are spread across the world. The infor-
mation is stored in the form of "resource records" belonging
to hierarchically organized "zones".
By default, the program simply converts between host names
and Internet addresses. However, with the -t, -a and -v
options, it can be used to find all of the information about
domain names that is maintained by the domain nameserver
system. The information printed consists of various fields
of the associated resource records that were retrieved.
The arguments can be either host names (domain names) or
numeric Internet addresses.
'host' is compatible with both BIND 4.9 and BIND 4.8
'host' may be found in contrib/host in the BIND distribution. The latest version always available for anonymous ftp from
ftp.nikhef.nl : /pub/network/host.tar.Z
It may also be found for anonymous ftp from
ftp.uu.net : /networking/ip/dns/host.tar.Z
Question 3.5. How can I use DNS information in my
program?
Date: Fri Feb 10 15:25:11 EST 1995
It depends on precisely what you want to do:
hpux.csc.liv.ac.uk : /hpux/Networking/Admin/resparse-1.2
You may find utilities and tools to help you manage your zone files (including WWW front-ends) in the "tools" section of the DNS resources directory:
http://www.dns.net/dnsrd/tools.html
Two that come to mind are MIT's WebDNS and the University of Utah tools.
There are also a number of commercial IP management tools available. Data Communications had an article on the subject in Sept/Oct of 1996. The tools mentioned in the article and a few others may be found at the following sites:
Chris Peckham - 16 July 1998