On Wed, 20 Nov 1996, Ian McKellar wrote:

> Neil Renfrey articulated:
> > 
> > 
> > Could someone please explain to me the complexity of DNA. What processes are 
> > there involved that take days or weeks.
> 
> AFAIK its just adding lines to a config file, and sending a SIGHUP to the 
> server. I wrote some CGI scripts to automate this (for my nameserver) a few
> months ago, and that only took a couple of hours. Of course they aren't actually
> reliable, but it wouldn't take long if I was motivated.
> 
Ian,

That sort of scripting is fine if you don't have to check reliability of 
the entire namespace, and make sure that everyone else has set up all 
their servers correctly and that they are all fully functional and reachable.

We have had to develop quite a complex system to help us do this in as little 
amount of time as is reasonably possible... about 8 weeks of 70 hours + 
per week and well over 4500 lines of code... it's simply not as straight 
forward as you make out.

When there are number of domains in COM.AU as there are at the moment 
 - 11674 to be exact - (as at 7:00 pm Nov 20) that all have to be kept 
looking OK, and therefore at least 11674 customers, it has to be done 
properly.

We are doing everything we can to help people...

Cheers,

Drew
----

Andrew Heath - drew§MelbourneIT.com.au
Melbourne IT System and Network Manager