Zone Check sources

Some words about Zone Check :

Zone check is a tool that I created while I was working at the french Network Information Center. It checks that a domain matches some criterias and can be added successfully into the DNS.

Most of the work of the french NIC (and other NICs who manages top level domains) is to register new domains under the national top level domain.

To improve the quality of the naming system (the Domain Name System), we set up some standards required for domains to be installed, we did not invent much but just collected some existing specs.

At first we checked the new domains one by one, but in 1995 the number of submissions was so important that I started writing a simple shell script to do this. Then came the idea to do this with a W3 interface. The main reasons were :

Let the user check his new domain by itself without requiring to install some (complicated) software on his workstation.
Be more user friendly, be able to empasise on errors and provide some optional help text and references.
Be multi-lingual.
Have a portable tool, not in the source form, but that can be used on a wide range of computers.

Not all the goals have been met, mainly due to a lack of time...

Sources

ZoneCheck is written in perl 4, it is around 4000 lines of program, librairies and text. I am curently rewriting it in perl 5, trying to split this up in reusable modules. I am not proud of the style of this big program, but most of it was written in a hurry and never cleaned up.

The current version is 1.0, written during January 1995 and maintained during the year 1995.

The package is available here, it is a gzipped tar file.

Copyright

This tool is copyrighted by Benoit Grangé and the NIC France, January 1995. You are allowed to modify and distribute it freely if this copyright notice remains untouched. This copyright notice must appear in the output of the tool.

Support

The current publicly available version of ZoneCheck is not supported, mainly because I am completly rewriting it. If you have any questions, you can mail me at ben@oleane.net.

ZoneCheck has only be used on Sun Sparc machines running SunOS 4.1.3 (patch level +infinity) with perl 4.036 and using NCSA HTTP server version 1.4.

Not much information is given here, but I hope that it will be enough for most of you.

Installation

Get the package, un-tar it in some neat place. Put the perl librairies in a place where perl can find them, put the for-HTTP files in your W3 filesystem, make sure to make the .cgi files executable.

You will also need to use h2ph to make the resolver.ph and nameser.ph files based on the C include files.

Because I am writing a new version, I won't work much on helping installing and porting this to other systems.

Credits

Thanks to all French NIC staff, they alpha and beta tested this tool and helped me much. Thanks to Marc Horowitz (marc@mit.edu) who intially wrote the perl resolver.

About the author

Benoit Grangé worked at the NIC France between September 1994 and December 1995. He now works for Oleane, a French Internet Service Provider and can be mailed at ben@oleane.net.