Name Away!

I wish the professional world could see the conditions under which these words are being written – our IT center is currently moving. My colleagues haven't been rifling through file cabinets like this since the crowning of Charlemagne, and they've become instant archaeologists making some valuable finds. One colleague – let's call him Qumran – has unearthed a document in Schwabacher typeface on SAN/NAS. An IBM printer that, without any accessories, can cut through rock is fascinating a bunch of mainframers. Just an hour ago, I fooled around with one of young Alexander Graham Bell's early cable modems. Next door, the shy apprentice IT networkers are sharing a '93 Slackware – an excellent year.

In contrast, NicTool [1], a comprehensive DNS management system written almost entirely in Perl, has been around only since 2000. The client components run as CGI on an Apache host. The management system takes its work assignments in two ways. First, there's a Perl API that, for example, feeds into a provisioning system. An Internet service provider can then easily integrate NicTool into its business processes: When a customer asks for web space, a simple command in the API can serve it a domain name in DNS.

The second possibility is in the accompanying web interface. I can use the web interface to manage multiple nameservers with their relevant zones (Figure 1). NicTool does plausibility and syntax checks for all zone modifications, which is a good way to avoid typo frustration. A hierarchical rule structure allows me to manage nameservers or delegate zones to someone else.

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