OT bind DNS puzzle/question discussion

[Paul E Condon <pecondon@mesanetworks.net>]

I recently spent some time getting bind9 working on a small home lan
so that some Macs, which don't understand /etc/hosts, could display
useful info about resources on the lan.  In the process I learned
vastly more about DNS than I knew before, but still not much.  Here is
an idea that I came up with while learning.

The format of the configuration files in bind seems to be highly
optomized for quick reading by a low IQ deamon. This is good for fast
operation of DNS lookups, but makes configuration difficult. For
instance, the direct lookup files and the reverse lookup files contain
the same network information but organized for fast lookup in the
forward and reverse directions. I feel that even if I were to become
proficient at writing these files, the knowledge would not stick with
me very long once I got some adjustment to a setup working. I flatter
myself to think that, maybe this is a problem for other people
also. So I wonder if it might be possible to define a database schema
for defining DNS rules and local network configurations in an
administrator friendly format, and a script/program for reading this
database and generating the bind9 config files that implements its
contents in the existing deamon friendly format.

This seems to be to be such a good idea that I have trouble believing
no one has thought of it before me. So who has already done work along
these lines? Or why is it not such a good idea?

-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon@mesanetworks.net