Matthew Horsfall

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!