Education | State University of New York

Adonis DNS Appliance Shines on SUNY

OVERVIEW

State University of New York (SUNY) is recognized as the largest public university system in the United States. Serving a student population of more than 410,000 and employing 26,000 faculty members, SUNY has 64 campuses located across the state of New York. More than 6,650 degree and certificate programs are offered to full-time and part-time students who pursue their studies in classrooms and laboratories, or at home through distance learning programs. From the City of Albany, the state capital, a team of four individuals operates the State University of New York Intranet in addition to supporting domain hosting for many of SUNY’s technology, university, and community colleges, and university centers and doctoral institutions.

Provision and maintenance of DNS for approximately 100 SUNY domains is the responsibility of Kevin Stillman, Manager of Network Planning, and his staff. A variety of domains including the University System’s main domain, suny.edu, which provides students, parents and potential students with a glimpse of SUNY as they evaluate their available options.

BACKGROUND

Members of the workgroup were accustomed to spending precious time performing tedious manual updates and edits in order to ensure the availability of the DNS services to the student, faculty and administrative communities across its 64 campuses. Notes Stillman, “Mistakes were common since we were making changes to zone files manually. in-addr.arpa records were often forgotten.”

The ongoing maintenance of an old Solaris™ server running an earlier version of BIND software had become a challenge for the team. Facing the prospect of upgrading the hardware as well as BIND to its latest release, Stillman decided the time was right to migrate DNS operations off the Solaris box and onto a dedicated server running the Linux® operating system. He began exploring options.

SOLUTION

After watching an online demonstration of the Adonis 1000 DNS/DHCP Appliance™ from BlueCat Networks, it became quite clear to Stillman that the dedicated DNS appliance, with its Java™ technology-based management console could bring value and relief to his team. He was sold on the appliance approach to secure DNS. Stillman deployed two Adonis 1000 DNS/DHCP Appliances, one in Albany and the other appliance at a college serving as a redundant secondary server.

The Adonis Management Console™ was installed on a Windows® OS client. With its cross-platform functionality, should SUNY later change its desktop system, the Adonis Management Console could be installed on a new client platform. Ease of installation was not the only reason SUNY welcomed Adonis with open arms. According to Stillman, “it has made DNS administration for my work group much simpler and less prone to mistakes.”

For new staff, the learning curve was minimal. The Adonis Management Console standardized the procedures to manage DNS and consequently made it easier for them to learn how to make DNS changes. With Adonis on the team, Stillman reports it’s now much simpler for personnel to manage multiple DNS servers located throughout the state. Now, staff can configure multiple servers in a single project file and the tedious task of matching secondary zones with their corresponding primary server has been eliminated. Resource records are now linked between servers and zones to create configurations that update themselves based on key records. The previously forgotten in-addr.arpa records are now updated and kept current automatically.

What really places Adonis at the front of the class is the Live Data Checkand Validation feature. The Adonis Management Console can check SUNY’s DNS configuration for syntactical and logical errors, before Stillman and his team deploy it live. The Live Data Check and Validation feature analyzes how SUNY’s DNS resource records have been named, and their interdependencies. Syntactical errors are pinpointed, and an explanation of the error is provided, such as invalid space characters from imported data or absolute names that are relative. Subsequently, the team can quickly correct errors before it deploys the system live. Equally impressive for Stillman is the Adonis Management Console’s built-in intelligence, and the ability to automatically generate reverse records.

IMPACT

Since replacing the old UNIX® box with the Adonis 1000 DNS/DHCP Appliance™ and a redundant secondary server in 2003, Stillman and his team continue to save time. Now, energy and effort can be spent on more productive and interesting tasks rather than fixing DNS errors. Stillman can rest easy with the knowledge that Adonis has simplified the management of the State University of New York’s DNS. After all, it is SUNY’s mission to learn, to search and to serve. Thanks to BlueCat Networks, the State University of New York continues its mission with its DNS secured, and its intranet available to students, faculty and staff. www.suny.edu is readily available to the citizens of New York and the Net.