Other Tools – Networking Public

This page contains information about other DNS and DHCP tools available to campus IT professionals.

Contents

1 Production IPAM
2 Development IPAM
3 dhcpmon
4 Domain Request Form
5 Contacts Database
6 dig
7 Host Manager

Production IPAM

Production IPAM Grid Manager is located at https://ipam.illinois.edu/

See Using IPAM for instructions.

Development IPAM

The development IPAM system located at https://dev.ipam.illinois.edu/ is a good place to safely experiment with new CSV imports, API scripts, or interface features you haven’t used before. Please note that we enable IT Pros to use dev.ipam on an “as is” basis, with the important caveats that it is not always available, often contains data that is inaccurate or extremely out of date, and may be completely overwritten at any time without warning.

dev.ipam is not reachable from off-campus, so you may need to use the VPN.

Test authoritative DNS queries sent to dns-dev1.techservices.illinois.edu (from on campus) will be answered using the data configured in dev.ipam:

dig +norecurse @dns-dev1.techservices.illinois.edu foo.sandbox.illinois.edu a

dhcpmon

dhcpmon provides graphs for each subnet showing the utilization of dynamically-allocated DHCP addresses over the past day, week, month, and year.

Please note the following limitations:

actual usage data may be up to 15 minutes older than the graph timestamp
abandoned lease counts are updated only once per day
addresses from multiple Ranges are aggregated together
unused addresses within Reserved Ranges are misleadingly counted as available even though in fact they can never be assigned to a DHCP client (see also Known Issues)

In general, dhcpmon works well for the common case of nets containing a single DHCP Range (with optional Exclusion Ranges). If your net contains multiple DHCP Ranges and/or any Reserved Ranges, be very careful when drawing conclusions from dhcpmon data.

Domain Request Form

The Domain Request Form is located at go.illinois.edu/domainrequest

See Requesting DNS Domains for more information.

Contacts Database

Network administrators can now keep their identities up to date using Contacts Database .

dig

dig is the preferred client tool for troubleshooting DNS issues because of its flexibility and detailed output. This section is intended as a quick-start guide to help you get it running on your workstation.

Windows:

Browse to https://downloads.isc.org/isc/bind9/cur/9.16/ and download the latest stable release of BIND 9 as a Windows zip file (e.g. “BIND9.16.7.x64.zip“).
Extract the zipfile’s contents to a temporary directory on your workstation.
Run “BINDInstall.exe” and choose the “Tools only” option (since you don’t want to install the BIND server on your workstation).
Open a Command Prompt and run dig from the directory where you installed it, e.g.
```
cd "C:\Program Files\ISC BIND 9\bin"
dig
```
Note that previous versions installed dig under C:\WINDOWS\system32\dns\bin or C:\WINDOWS\SysWOW64\dns\bin
Optionally, you may add the above bin directory to your PATH for convenience (the details of this step are outside the scope of this document, but try searching the web for “set windows path”).

Mac OS X:

Modern versions of OS X come with dig pre-installed. Just open a Terminal window and run dig.

Linux:

dig is readily available as a package for most linux distributions. Look for a package called “bind-utils”, “dnsutils”, or “dnstools”.

To test that your installation of dig is working, run a simple query:

dig @8.8.8.8 www.illinois.edu a

This should return the IP address of our web server (in the ANSWER section).

Plenty of other documentation has already been written about the details of working with dig; just search the web for “dig tutorial”.
See also the dig manual page.

Host Manager

If you have questions about campus DNS services, email hostmgr@illinois.edu.