@ IN SOA localdomain. aaron.localdomain.

So, I finally got my networking set up at home a couple months ago. There's a little web interface to add computers to the network, which automatically updates DHCP and DNS and allows them on wireless.

I also have an IPv6 tunnel and auto-configuration for my /48 (rDNS is annoyingly difficult, thanks to comcast).

So, of course, this weekend I got to break it all!

I've been using dnsmasq on my linux server to do DHCP and DNS. Basically, it looks through /etc/hosts and /etc/ethers and figures out the answers to queries from there. It also has support for built-in TFTP and can send the right options to be able to PXE boot computers. Neat.

But, my router is running FreeBSD, and I want to reload my linux box to OpenSolaris. The linux machine is basically a fileserver, so reloading it means I can use ZFS. Here's the overall plan:

1. reload fileserver
2. ???
3. profit

Step 1 requires that I move the infrastructure (DHCP, DNS, TFTP, etc.) onto the router, which I've been meaning to do anyway. I've got linux compatibility mode turned on on the router, so I could probably run dnsmasq on there, but that's not very impressive. Bind9 and ISC dhcpd is a much cooler option.

Enter `svn branch`.

Today, I spent my time rewriting my networking automagic (the scripts, not the daemon) to generate DNS zone files from my networking database. Of course, the cron will still run on the db server, since I don't want to be firing up make and perl on the router every 5 minutes. Sure, I could, but the db would be hella slow. Now I've got DNS running on 2 boxes, and as soon as I figure out all the merging and branching and moving to make it work correctly, I'll be able to shut down the DNS server on linux.

DHCP will, of course, require me to learn yet another config file format, but it looks similar, and I should just have to tweak the scripts a little bit to make them output the new format. The only hard part of dnsmasq -> named was the conversion from /etc/hosts to the IPv6 PTR records. About 30 lines of perl run through the whole shooting match for that; IPv4 is just an extra sed script.

:wq