DNS appliance

 

Matching hardware to workload

ApplianSys doesn’t believe “one size fits all” and so offer a wide range of hardware options to closely match your requirement and your budget.

Industrial grade for peace of mind

Some vendors use ‘off the shelf’ server platforms or consumer grade components to build appliances. We don’t. ApplianSys only use industrial grade components, optimising every aspect of the appliance for peak performance and reliability.

“The device has required zero maintenance, freeing up our engineers to worry about other systems. We have come to view DNSBOX as one of the most reliable elements in our enterprise.” -
CTO, Texas Association of Local Health Officials

Rock solid reliability

CompactFlash cards are used for the operating system and settings. This has several advantages over traditional hard disks:

• Hard disks have moving parts and are the primary cause of hardware failure. So being diskless, DNSBOX is much more reliable
• It means faster boot times and gives more resilience to hardware failure. If you suffer an unexpected power outage, the risk of configuration data or application corruption is minimised
• Cards can be easily ejected from each unit once it has been powered down, allowing them to be moved to a spare or new appliance in the unlikely event of failure, retaining all settings and license information and data. The replacement unit continues from where the failed unit left off, without the need to reinstall software or recover data

There are two CompactFlash cards used in the system:

• The Program card is bootable and contains the operating system and applications. It contains two read-only copies of the firmware, one live, one ready for upgrade. Licence data also resides on this card
• The Data card contains all your configuration settings and DNS/IPAM data

 

Hardened operating system

The Linux-based operating system used by DNSBOX is a custom-built ‘appliance distribution’ developed by ApplianSys to optimise its appliance products. It is designed to maximise security, reliability and ease of use:

• All programs, services and files found on a standard Linux distribution that are not required for a DNS server are not included, making DNSBOX faster and more secure than a standard Linux server
• The appliance is protected by an on-box firewall: ports are only opened in the firewall as needed when services are enabled. All other traffic is dropped
• DNSBOX uses a read-only compressed filesystem. This is best practice for appliances, being extremely solid and reliable. The fact that core operating system files are maintained read-only adds an extra security layer

 

Shared Management Support

To help make sharing administration tasks easier you can let multiple administrators in different locations log in to the interface at one time. Access can be controlled via RADIUS or on-box authentication and you can create Users without ‘admin’ rights to log in to view data without being able to change it.

Reporting Tools

Graphical reports let you see the health of your appliance and let you monitor such things as the load, status of the services and condition of the hardware.

Logging Support

DNSBOX generates standard syslog records which you can redirect to a syslog server elsewhere on your network to meet data retention laws and assist in investigations. You can view recent messages and alerts directly from the Appliance Interface.

Backup and Restore

Configuration parameters can be backed up with a single click, then archived or sent to your vendor technical support to aid in troubleshooting. Restoration of previous back-ups can be performed with similar ease.

High Availability Upgrade System

Upgrades provided by ApplianSys (adding features, responding to newly discovered security flaws in BIND, etc) are applied using an upgrade mechanism engineered to minimise disruption to your DNS. Services continue to be available whilst the system is being upgraded, and in the event of an interuption to the upgrade, such as a power failure, you can quickly rollback to a previous system image.

Alerts

Email and SMS alerts let you monitor your system when you're on the move, whilst SNMP traps let you access performance statistics in real-time via external management applications.