dennis is a first stab at automating and streamlining DNS. Feedback sought.
Current status is that I am working on it again so expect more changes to
come down the line. I would say this is in snapshot status. I'll put up 
new tarballs when I feel like it.

Email address is in the tarball or take a wild guess =)

###############################################################################
UPDATE 5/15/99: 
	After not having done anything to this code for a long time, I think I
	will have some free time soon. Currently the configuration mechanism
	sucks and I am thinking about rewriting it for the next version. What I
	would like to know is if there is any interest in a tool like this at
	all. I will only continue to develop this if there is interest since I
	am no longer in IS and do not have to deal with DNS anymore (yay!). 
	Please send mail to dennis@carumba.com to let me know. On the other
	hand, someone else is free to take over as maintainer.
###############################################################################

--Jauder


---

Below is a message that I sent to some people as to how to use this.

From jauderho Mon Sep  7 13:38:42 1998
Date: Sat, 5 Sep 1998 20:15:46 -0700 (PDT)
From: Jauder Ho 
To: The Innocent
Subject: dennis

Most if not all of the intricate back twisting should be done now. Please
feel free to take a look around. All of this stuff is installed in
/var/named on marvin. 

Since this is not in production yet, you want to make use the tools in
/var/named/tools. A short explaination follows with the sequence which for
now is dnsGenHosts, autoDennis and "sudo ndc reload"

dnsGenHosts
	This does an "echo ls -d <domain.com> | nslookup |" and groks the
output from that. It generates an /etc/hosts file which you can examine in
/var/named/etc/hosts (under RCS control).

autoDennis
	This is basically a simple script that called dennisBuild and
createSecondary. What can I am say? I'm lazy.

sudo ndc reload
	You know what this does.


The real magic happens in /var/named/bin, there are three scripts, namely
dnsVerify, dennisBuild and createSecondary.

dnsVerify
	This checks an /var/named/etc/hosts for correctness and bitches
accordingly. Try running it. It'll bitch up a storm right now coz it can't
tell the difference between multiple A records and duplicate IPs. I
haven't quite figured out how to deal with that yet. This was immensely
useful at KLA-Tencor where I found tons of duplicate IPs.

dennisBuild
	Depending on a switch you flip, it can create either bind4 or
bind8 config files. It picks up new subnets automatically so that the
previous fiasco with not updating a named.boot will not happen again. And
of course it does intelligent auto serial updates. It also intelligently
saves copies of old config files so if something goes wrong, original
server can be restored in very short order.

createSecondary
	As its name indicates, it creates secondary bind config files. It
currently only creates bind4. I haven't had time to write the bind8
generator yet. RSN. I haven't decided on a final distribution method yet.
At KLA-Tencor, I was the central DNS admin with lots of scattered
scattered sysadmins (which I think was a bad idea), a new named.boot would
be mailed to them every time something changed but I can make an option
for it to just rsh out to the secondaries instead.

I hope this explains most of what this software can do. Feel free to find
bugs, suggest feature ehancements...

--Jauder