Announcing Net::RNDC - Communicate with BIND through Perl

I often have need to communicate with ISC's BIND programattically and I haven't found any libraries out there to do that.

Often, what you'll see is a wrapper around BIND's rndc utility that forks, execs, passes it arguments, and then parses the output.

This is okay if you're on a box that can fork and has rndc installed, but that's not a safe assumption.

So I spent some time digging through BIND source and deconstructing the RNDC protocol (which was actually quite fun) and came up with Net::RNDC:


use Net::RNDC;

my $rndc = Net::RNDC->new(
host => '127.0.0.1',
port => 953, # Defaults to 953
key => 'abcd',
);

if (!$rndc->do('status')) {
die "RNDC failed: " . $rndc->error;
}

print $rndc->response;

The base Net::RNDC interface is synchronous, but you can use Net::RNDC::Session asynchronously, or just use Net::RNDC::Packet itself to generate/parse RNDC packets.

The packet interface isn't yet well defined (just read/write entries in a hashref), but I hope to improve on that soon.

Enjoy,

-- Matthew Horsfall (alh)

PS: Thanks to my employer Dyn for allowing us 2 days a month to hack on projects that we want!

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About Matthew Horsfall (alh)

user-pic I blog about Perl.