BINDMON
=======

Introduction

  BINDMON is a program used to accomplish some degree of fault tolerance
  in TCP/IP services, by monitoring service health and updating BIND
  maps whenever a service comes up or down.
  
  To use it, you must:
  
  * Rename your current BIND input files to an input form.  For instance,
    if you currently have a file called db.domain, you might rename it
    to db.domain.in
  
  * Encapsulate entries for single-service hosts in your BIND input file
    to show that they depend on some TCP service.  For instance, where
    you now might have:
  
      gateway.m-tech.ab.ca.  0 IN A  10.0.0.1
  
    You could write:
  
      #ifup 10.0.0.1 80 5 1 5
        gateway.m-tech.ab.ca.  0 IN A  10.0.0.1
      #endif
  
    This means that the record should only be included if port 80 on
    10.0.0.1 is open (maybe it's a WWW server).  The health of the 
    port should be checked every 5 minutes.  If a single failure to
    open has been detected, the record should be removed.  If five
    consecutive attempts have succeeded, then it can be reactivated.
  
  * Run bindmon with arguments telling it:
    - where to put its log files
    - where its input/output files are
    - what command to use to reload the map files into bind
    - how long it should wait to establish any given socket (timeout)
  
    Note: you must specify full paths for all files, as the bindmon
    program will run as a daemon with a CWD of /.

Platform

  This program was written on and for Linux/Intel/ELF/libc6.
  It should compile cleanly on any ANSI-C environment, and should
  be useful on any Unix or Unix-like system.

  This program is primarily intended to monitor and interact
  with the Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND).  However, it
  might be useful in other situations.

Warranties

  The author provides no warranties for this software.

Author

  This program was developed by Idan Shoham at M-Tech Mercury
  Information Technology, Inc.  Any correspondence relating to
  this program should be directed to:

       bindmon@m-tech.ab.ca

  The program was developed for internal use at M-Tech, with
  the hope that it will be useful to others.  It is being released
  under the GNU Public License (GPL).  Please see the attached
  COPYING file for the text of this license.

Manifest

  CHANGELOG    - revision history for this software
  COPYING      - the GNU Public License
  INSTALL      - installation instructions
  Makefile     - used to compile it, test it, etc.
  README       - this file
  TODO         - some thoughts about what additions would be useful
  VERSION      - what is the current version of the software?
  src          - the source code
  test         - a simple test directory