Power DNS Administration Tool

Introduction

Pdns is a gui administration tool for maintaining domains and their DNS records. It allows new domains to be created and existing domains to be modified and deleted.

This tool is based of of the Qt tool kit from Trolltech and the QcjData classes. It is built for use with the postgres database, but should be usable for any database which pdns and Qt can handle.

Building and Instalation

Pdns is built as any Qt application. After unpacking the tar file, cd into its directory. First execute the commands qmake pdns.pro; make. These two command are all it takes to build it.

Installation is relatively easy. Once built, the executable can be placed where convenient. Then either pdns.xml or pdns-postgres.xml must be copied and possibly renamed to one of the following files:

• ~/.pdns.xml
• ~/.xml/pdns.xml
• /opt/pdns/default_forms.xml

Or it can be named pdns.xml and opied to the location of the executable.

Before Pdns can be run, a small bit of sql must be executed. This creates a view tying the records table and the domains table. In the case that postgresql database it also creates a view and associated rules to allow the application to operate with it instead of the domains table. Choose the appropriate file, pdns.sql or pdns-postgres.sql and execute it.

Viewing the main window in the Qt designer

If you are tempted to view the mainwindow ui using designer, you must build the QcjData class Plugins first! If you do not, and save the pdns.ui file, you will loose vital information. Please visit the homepage of the QcjData Classes for instructions on how to build the plugins. It's a fairly straight forward proceedure.

Operation and Usage

Pdns can be executed from the command line by typing in its name 'pdns'. This program will output a fair amount of logging information to stdout. In most cases this output can be ignored.

When started for the first time, it should be configured be clicking on the Edit menu then Configure item. This will bring up a dialog with various elements to be configured.

Beyond this, the operation is pretty straight forward. The top half of the main window is for viewing manipulating the domain records. The bottom half is for viewing and manipulating the name records themselves. On the top half, the buttom Create Records Will create some initial ame records for the selected domain if an SOA record does not already exist for the domain.

Download the Source

You can get the source here! ftp://ftp.linuxlots.com/pub/pdns

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