dnsvi

BIND 9's dynamic zone configuration makes it very easy to edit the records in zones, however, the program nsupdate is horrific to use. The lack of decent editing make it terrible. I found a program called ldapvi which allows you to edit an LDAP tree with your favourite editor. I eventually got the idea to do the same thing for DNS using dig and nsupdate.

It's a simple shell script that requires dig, nsupdate and GNU diff. Just run dnsvi zone and it will to a transfer and allow you to edit the zone with your $EDITOR. Once you save and quit, it will push your changes to the DNS server. You can also specify a key via the -k or -y parameters. When editing, the @ character will be substituted for the zone specified on the command line. This means the syntax of the file isn't quite the same as the BIND zone files. For instance, if you invoked dnsvi example.org, then to add a host named foo, insert foo.@ IN A 1.2.3.4.

All the updates are done in a single transaction, so if one should fail, the others won't be processed. I think it would work with non-BIND DNS servers assuming they support DDNS. Large zones take time to transfer and transferring sub-trees in a zone is not possible. I also have no idea what would happen if you changed the SOA. Good luck.

dnsvi Script