[dns-wg] Managing the database of a registry (Was: Remote registration,

On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 03:05:22AM +0430,
 alireza saleh <saleh at mailhost.nic.ir> wrote 
 a message of 18 lines which said:

> Thank you about a software that supports reseller, I think due to special 
> laws in my country,a software  have to be developed by the team 

It is quite difficult to write a software that will work for every NIC
in the world (even with a lot of options in the configuration
file). Unless everybody chooses Verisign's model of a registry, of
course. But if you want to follow your own way, you'll have to do some
coding.

> Do we have any program for editing and appending Bind Zone files ?,in 
> the other word a CGI program that gives the name sever, ip address and 
> the domain name as input ,then it modifies or add this entry ?

I would suggest another way: put the information (domain names,
contacts, name servers - not always with the IP address, only when
it's necessary, reseller, etc) in some sort of database (a RDBMS, for
instance) and have the zone file be generated from the database.

1) Your CGI will then edit the database (easier than parsing BIND zone
file), every "database-backed Web site" works that way. See
<URL:http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/webdbapps/> for a PHP example (but
you can do it in Perl, Python, whatever).

2) To extract info from the database, use something like Perl DBI
<URL:http://www.perl.com/pub/a/1999/10/DBI.html> (a ten-line script is
sufficient) or a shell command as simple as (for PostgreSQL):

#!/bin/sh
psql -q --no-align --tuples-only registry \
     -c "SELECT address, hosts.name as host, domains.name as domain\
           FROM Hosts,Domains,Nameservers\
           WHERE nameservers.domain = domains.id AND \
                 nameservers.nameserver = hosts.id" |\
   awk -F \| '{ print $3". IN NS "$2"."; if ($1) {print $2". IN A "$1"" } }' 

3) You will have all the power of the database at your disposal. For
instance, you'll be able to develop new applications with SQL quite
easily. A whois server becomes very simple to create, for instance.

This is more work than just managing the BIND zone file but it's worth
it, IMHO.