DNS Enabler for Mac

User Reviews

• You just can't put a (good) GUI on BIND

  khiltdDecember 5, 2007

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I have mixed feelings about this utility. It's great for quickly roughing in some working BIND configurations, but its simplicity encourages a set-it-and-forget-it sort of attitude in users who might not be well versed in BIND administration, and this can leave them vulnerable to certain forms of attacks that could be easily prevented. The configurations generated by DNS Enabler display full version information and allow full zone transfers to any and all who request it. Both of these things are easily corrected by adding the appropriate directives to the options section of named.conf, but such changes are immediately obliterated as soon as you restart the server. It is necessary to descend the application's bundle hierarchy to edit the template file directly if you want to secure your server--something most people in this application's target audience are probably not apt to do. It also enforces some undesirable requirements on the NS records it will allow you to create, and no configuration changes will survive its "error" checking process; make a single mistake in dozens of entries and they are all wiped out as soon as you click the Restart button. This is frustrating and genuinely unnecessary. While it does allow you to vend static Bonjour services (provided you know exactly how to create them from scratch anyway), it does not allow you to do what most people who are interested in leveraging Bonjour will likely expect, namely facilitate dynamic updates. Of course, it's simply impossible to put a (comprehensible) UI on every option BIND has to offer, so a little slack has to be cut somewhere. What I think would be the most beneficial to everyone would be to have the default config files include other files (possibly in ~/Library/Application Support) that would permit the user to override or extend the default configs to suit their needs, but then again, anyone who knows how to do this will probably just use BIND directly. Still, for quick-and-dirty setups, it's extremely handy and I've never seen it crash. Just beware that if you're running a public server with it you should probably run your zone through Cricket Liu's free config/security auditor at least once to make sure you know what you're broadcasting.

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