EOL Asset DB – DNS management

The IT Assets Database was replaced by the IT Admins CMDB and is EOL / End of Life, no further development will be done on this project.

DNS entries are so important but often not documented well. Everyone came across DNS entries where they start asking what is this used for and is this still active or not?

Out of this purpose, a module the manage all the DNS zones (internal and external) as well es their DNS entries was implemented in the Asset Database. This allows you to create zones as you need them and document the important entries.

Of course, don’t start documenting simple host names – those are easy to validate. What you want to document are internal static entries and aliases and relate them to their relative servers and services. Add TAGs, target IP addresses as well as notes to them.

For external DNS zones, make sure you document each single entry.

Imagine you retire a server and see that you have DNS entries linked to it. You actually can look at those entries and see if the server you are about to retire is the last one that was related to it and if so clean up DNS as well in the process. Or you come across a DNS entry in some clean-up or migration efforts and wonder what it actually is used for – just look it up and see what is really going on.

All of this boils always down to documentation. The Asset Database was designed to not just track your assets, it was designed to document information about them as well and is an essential part of the system.

Data field and reference overview

  • Active / Disabled
  • Zone
    • zones are configured in a rather flat sub table
      • friendly zone name
        • suggestion: use domain.com – internal and domain.com – external if you host the same zone internally and externally
      • hosted by – provider, or your DCs
      • description
      • Expense reference
  • DNS Entry Type
    • common types are
      • A, AAA, ALIAS, CNAME, MX, NS, PRT, SOA, SRV, TXT
    • add you special types as needed
  • DNS Name
  • Priority
  • Target
  • TTL
  • Description
  • References to
  • notes

 

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