DNS Enabler 4.0

DNS Enabler 4.0 is such a marvellous program which lets Mac users set up a fully-functional Domain Name Server on a plain Mac OS X machine with just one click. It is designed to allow a user to set up domain name information quickly using a single window, in the fastest time.
DNS Enabler provides the interface to allow users to specify name-to-address mappings for machines on the Internet, as well as their aliases or MX records (which specify that certain machines act as mail servers for the domain).

Additionally, it allows users to set the other domain and zone information, like the Time-To-Live intervals that determine how long these information remain valid.

It will automatically generate the appropriate named.conf file, the forward mapping files for each domain, the reverse mapping files for each network, and all the resource and reverse pointer records from the specifications entered.

Major Features:

1. DNS Enabler for Snow Leopard
   • You can now configure DNS Enabler using a non-admin account. Just provide either the full name or the OS X short name of an admin-level user and the administrator's password.
   • DNS Enabler now sports a customizable toolbar, containing three panels - the main DNS Enabler domain configuration panel, a panel to set up Bonjour Wide-Area Services, and a Log Panel showing the contents of the named.log.
   • You can start, stop, and restart DNS services. And there is a button to reload the data with the settings currently in effect at the server.
2. A Basic DNS Configuration for the Local Network
   • Scenario : DNS Enabler on a private local network
   • Another Scenario : This happens quite often - you may have set up a web or mail server behind a router, broadband modem, or wireless base station when you noticed that machines on the local network cannot "see" the server via its domain name, while machines outside the network can (e.g., you've used dyndns.org or some such service to obtain your own domain name).
   • In this case, you can use DNS Enabler to broadcast the domain name to all the local machines (using the simple configuration outlined above) and help them find their way to your server. This has helped many MailServe users who are behind routers that don't know how to route outgoing packets back to an equivalent local IP address (that the public IP address is port-mapped to) and that are also hard to configure, to boot.
3. A Configuration for the Public Network
   • Scenario : DNS Enabler on a public network. Introducing MX records.
   • Across the firewall from the public network, the company runs a private local network (in the 192.168.0.x range). DNS Enabler can handle the setup of the name service for this local network within the same window. Because it is a private network, it can be given any domain name.
4. MX records :
   • If ISP is provided with a backup mail server in case the whole domain is down, can specify this backup mail server.
5. Advanced Configurations: The following screenshot shows DNS Enabler handling the data entry for the domain described in Paul Albitz and Cricket Liu's DNS and BIND book.
6. DNS Zone Files: This is the zone file created by DNS Enabler for the above configuration.
7. What about MX Records, TXT Records, and Forwarders?
8. Setting up a Secondary Name Server: DNS Enabler also allows you to set up a secondary slave name server. In the example below, besides running DNS Enabler on the Primary Name server you can also install it on a Secondary Name Server.
9. Bonjour Wide-Area Services: What DNS Enabler saves the user is the need to know the specific syntax to set up SRV and TXT records at the DNS server. All he needs to know is the Bonjour service type, e.g., _http._tcp for publicising web pages (that may be served even from local private networks - you can use the Port number field to publicise a different port other than 80 and port-map that incoming request to a specific local machine) and the domain that will serve that request. The service name is a label that will show up in the Bonjour menu in, say, Safari. And the TXT column contains the path to that specific web page. (The TXT column stores different things for different services. See the cited Bonjour reference).
10. The Log Panel: The Log Panel shows the contents of the DNS Server log file at /Library/Logs/named.log, in reverse order, with the latest entries listed first. It also shows the current version number of the name server.
11. The Customization Panel: The Customization Panel allows you to re-arrange the DNS Enabler toolbar. For example, if you don't use Bonjour, you can hide the Bonjour button and, consequently, the Bonjour panel.
12. De-Installing DNS Enabler
    • You can de-install DNS Enabler by using the menu item, shown below, in the Help menu. It will shut down the DNS Server, if it is running, and remove all files installed by DNS Enabler.
    • DNS Enabler for Leopard works from its own folder in /usr/local/cutedge/named, in which are stuffed the named.conf and the db files used by DNS Enabler. The original /etc/named.conf and /var/named files are left un-touched by DNS Enabler and so DNS Enabler leaves your system in its original state after de-installation.