The Sysadmin’s Daily Grind: Dnsgraph

GRAPH MASTER

Article from Issue 69/2006

Author(s): CHARLY KÜHNAST

A partly overloaded DNS server can slow down all the workstations on the network. Dnsgraph is an early warning system that gives administrators a graph of critical values. Your Dnsgraph charts will help you keep your systems serving names.

Just recently I heard about a memory genius who could remember the value of pi to several thousand decimal figures; at the same time, this person couldn’t explain the practical value of this exercise. People like that don’t need a DNS server; instead they could just memorize a few thousand IP addresses. But normal folks prefer DNS. And if you run a name resolution service yourself, I’m sure you will appreciate Dnsgraph [1]. The project name indicates a similarity with projects such as Mailgraph and Queuegraph, and Dnsgraph is actually based on Mailgraph. The tool parses a file for the status information generated by my Bind 9 DNS server [2], and converts the figures into a graph.

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