README

HOSTDB is the host management system currently in use at Stockholm university.

With HOSTDB, you can maintain information about your hosts and have ISC DHCP
and ISC BIND zonefiles generated for you.
There are both web interfaces and command line interfaces to the database -
both of which use the HOSTDB perl API.

HOSTDB provides delegation of rights to manage certain zones or subnets to
other parts of your organization (web interface only). Access control can be
accomplished with lists of usernames (REMOTE_USER) and/or LDAP groups in the
configuration file.

HOSTDB is *very* mature. We have been using it since 2002 (and it is now 2010).

HOSTDB is NOT aiming at being feature rich - instead HOSTDB concentrates on
doing what it does very well and letting you do the rest by hand (or by other
means).

For DNS, this means that HOSTDB can manage A, CNAME and PTR (AAAA is a strong
wish list item). It cannot handle NS, MX or other DNS RRs.

Set it up like this, to be able to maintain less common DNS RRs in the zone
file directly, while still getting the bulk of your data from HOSTDB :

Zone file that BIND reads (e.g. /var/named/master/it.su.se..ZONE) :

  ; $Id: it.su.se..ZONE,v 1.126 2009-08-19 13:06:45 nn Exp $
  ;

  $INCLUDE /var/named/zonedata/it.su.se..DB

  $ORIGIN it.su.se.
  it.su.se.                   IN      NS      ns.su.se.
  it.su.se.                   IN      NS      ns2.su.se.
  it.su.se.                   IN      NS      ns3.su.se.
  it.su.se.                   IN      MX      10 mx.su.se.
  ...

Now generate the /var/named/zonedata/it.su.se..DB file with data from the
HOSTDB database using the command 'generate-zonefiles'. Note that HOSTDB
will generate a SOA record for you, and automatically manage the SOA serial.

DHCP can be set up in a similar fashion.