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| Chapter 4 Setting Up BIND |

## 4.6 Tools

Wouldn't it be handy to have a tool to translate your host table into name server file format? There is such a beast, written in Perl: `h2n` - a host table to name server file converter. You can use `h2n` to create your data the first time and then maintain your DNS data manually. Or, you can use `h2n` over and over again. As you have seen, the format of the host table is much simpler to understand and to modify correctly. So, you could maintain /etc/hosts and rerun `h2n` to update your DNS data after each modification.

If you plan to use `h2n`, you might as well start with it, since it uses /etc/hosts - not your hand-crafted DNS data - to generate the new DNS files. We could have saved ourselves lots of work by generating the sample data in this chapter with the following:

>     % h2n -d movie.edu -s terminator -s robocop \
>       -n 192.249.249 -n 192.253.253 \
>       -u al.robocop.movie.edu

(To generate a version 8 configuration file, add -v 8 to the option list.)

The -d and -n options specify the domain name and network numbers. You'll notice that the db filenames are derived from these options. The -s options list the name servers for the NS records. The -u (user) is the email address in the SOA record. We'll cover `h2n` in more detail in Chapter 7, after we've covered how DNS affects email.

4.5 Host Name Checking (BIND 4.9.4 and Later Versions) |  | 4.7 Running a Primary Master Name Server