Hybrid Cloud DNS with the Men&Mice Suite

Since its humble origins as QuickDNS for the Apple Macintosh, the Men&Mice Suite has evolved into a comprehensive management solution for existing heterogeneous DNS/DHCP environments, with a powerful IPAM module that allows for seamless AD Sites & Subnets management in Windows Active Directory environments. Since 2011 Men&Mice have also offered the Men&Mice Appliance for customers that desire integrated DNS/DHCP or caching appliance solutions.

Introducing the Generic DNS Server Controller

In 2014 Men&Mice introduced the Generic DNS Server Controller, an extension of the existing Men&Mice DNS Server Controller that allows the Men&Mice Suite to integrate with any DNS server product that features an API to access and update DNS data.

The result is a flexible DNS solution that can deploy and centrally manage a wide variety of DNS products within a single hybrid environment, all without having to replace existing DNS infrastructure.

Better living through scripting

With the Generic Controller, communication between the DNS Server Controller and the DNS server itself is not hard coded; instead, a scripting interface is called instead of directly accessing the server whenever changes are made through the Men&Mice Management Console (or any other Men&Mice client interfaces).

Men&Mice currently provides two scripts (written in python) to interface with a cloud based DNS service (Amazons Route53) and PowerDNS (with a MySQL back-end, which is widely used as authoritative DNS in the ISP market). These scripts can be further tweaked and configured to interface with any number of different DNS servers without changes to the core infrastructure.

Looking forward

What does this mean for Men&Mice's customers?

Put simply, it can significantly lower infrastructure costs when moving into the future; should you plan to migrate your data into a cloud based DNS service or even switch over to some other DNS product types like PowerDNS you can still use the Men&Mice Suite to manage the DNS/DHCP and IPAM with all the advantages it brings, such as audit trails, automation, and delegation.

• An administrator requests a change on the DNS server via the Men&Mice Management Console, which connects to the Men&Mice Central server.
• Men&Mice Central connects to the DNS Server Controller and relays the change request.
• The DNS Server Controller deploys the change and reports success or error back to Central.
• Central reports back to the administrator.