DNS Update

Performance Analysis of ACF's DNS Manager

Chetan Dube

The DNS Manager administers the growing database of the University's over 15,000 computer systems and network infrastructure devices. It manages the primary database for egress.nyu.edu, the server that provides forward and backward name resolution for nyu.edu zone requests from clients all over the Internet. The two basic modes of operation of the DNS Manager are read (view DNS and bootp entries) and write (add, delete and modify entries). As the read statistics are overflowing, we consider the more germane write statistics in this article.

ACF's DNS Management software went into service to manage the University's domain name system (DNS) database at the beginning of 1998. From January 5 to March 13, 1998, 3139 hosts have been registered, modified or deleted using the DNS and bootp management system.

The average response time to requests for host registration or modification has been reduced from a few days to just under three hours on an average work day. With further streamlining of the DNS database remake process, we hope to reduce this time to less than an hour.

Retrieving DNS and bootp Information

The ACF HelpLine staff employs the DNS manager extensively in read-only mode to query the DNS and bootp database in response to user inqueries about their IP address resolution and PC booting problems. With the increase in personal computers on the campus network, this HelpLine service is an important source of assistance.

Distributed Autonomous Operation

Decentralized autonomous operation is the raison d'être of the Domain Name System. It divides the NYU network of several thousand systems into logical subdomains and distributes the management responsibility of the subdomains to designated responsible persons with proper centralized authentication controls. This significantly reduces response times while saving centralized labor costs within ACF. This distributed management philosophy, which epitomizes healthy cooperation among the different departments of the University, has worked rather well so far. Departments and schools that have been given autonomous control over their respective subdomains now include the School of Law, Bobst Library, the Department of Computer Science & Mathematics, the University Computing Center, the Faculty of Arts & Science and the School of Dentistry.

Future Trends

The future evolution of the product includes incorporation of DHCP functionality, the ability to handle multi-homed computer systems and to restrict network access capabilities of systems based on their subnet location. [ C ]

Posted May 18,1998