On Wed, 13 Jul 2011, Emmett Culley wrote: > No, it isn't. At least it isn't trivial for those of us > that only occasionally need to modify their DNS server(s). > I had a few gripes about system-config-bind, but on the > whole it did make it easy for me to manage our DNS servers > without having to study the docs each time I needed to make > a change. I promised I would not get drawn into this thread, but ... This thread and its description of the experience gap is telling ... One camp wants a 'black box' tool that does _something_, so they can ignore what is happening 'under the covers' and move on to more interesting uses of the computer. And then there are the professionals. And this _is_ billed as a boring, trailing edge and stable, enterprise operating system, after all But my use cases are related to a prodduction environment, maintaining several hundred zone files, with lots of adds, changes, and deletes. The s-c-bind GUI tool was useless, compared to TUI edits (certain legacy systems) and scripts to do the backups, accuracy audit, and creation of all files including the PTR record files But our TUI system was really was not up to the new TXT record formats for anti-spam purposes, SRV records, and AAAA and ipv6 PTR generation, so we redesigned and have moved to a local database backed, webbish tool The latter still DISPLAYs zone files, so I can check its work (and indeed 'bind' dumps backups that look like zone files), but all transactions are done 'across the wire incrementally' through encrypted, keyed DNS tranactions, line by line, and NOT by shipping zone files around. There is also a webbish GUI permitting downloading a local format CSV representation of the zone files, that 'gnumeric' and Google spreadsheet read just fine But this GUI tool is also tightly coupled to local workflow, and not really something we would release the web LAMP sources for, because we ** want ** to be free to break the API as needed for business purposes > Now I suppose my only choice is to install webmin, or > compile system-config-bind from source. or, just maybe, study a zone file and read about it and grow in skills. Also, there exist on-line tools to construct well-formed zone files, and google has umpteen gazillion articles of varying quality and accuracy, I suppose. The two you list are your 'only' choice, only if you are into drama > I cannot understand the reasoning behind dropping > system-config-bind from CentOS/RHEL 6. Then leaving it in > Fedora. Since when is less tools better? Especially since > there doesn't seem to be a reasonable replacement for this > useful tool. I am not unbiased in this matter, as I asy, I've been building zone files for a long time, first using a locally hacked up and extended version of 'h2n', and other tools from the ORA Cricket book By comparison, the s-c- GUI DNS tool formerly offered reminded me of a lame little puppy -- better than nothing, but just barely. Lots of the 'glade' based 'tools' which the upstream has rolled out seem, to me, to be present to satisfy a PHB's requirement for a GUI tool on a checklist, for a given service. They could not be called 'best of breed' by a neutral observer, by any reach of the imagination -- Russ herrold