Once again I face a massive DNS cleanup. These zone files are a
spaghetti of weird includes and outdated information running on a box
which also does web/imap/smtp/mysql. At least it is CentOS 5.3 and not
Fedora Core 6 like a lot of their machines. They also don't have a
split view for internal which they really need (although I hate to
have to resort to split views due to the confusion they cause when
things work differently internally vs externally).

But having learned from the past I am very afraid of taking on any
such cleanup because that A record which everyone agrees isn't used
anymore actually serves some hidden critical function. 

I am wondering if there are any tools out there which can make this
easier. For example I am thinking that if I had a way to capture a
month's worth of DNS traffic and then replay that against the new name
server and make sure that any queries which returned responses on the
old setup also returned the same responses on the new server that
would make things much better.

Does such a tool exist? Is this a good idea? Any better way?

If it doesn't exist and I don't come up with a better way I may just
whip it up myself. Wireshark to record plus some code to extract the
queries and responses plus some code to re-run them should do the
trick.

I feel like I have taken on cleaning up other people's messes and
repaying years of technical debt to get my client/employer up to snuff
as a specialty. I suspect it is that way for every sysadmin who
bothers joining user groups or trade associations. If you care enough
about what you do to join these things then you are probably
particular about it and anywhere you go is going to seem to be a mess
which can be vastly improved.

-- 
Tracy Reed
http://tracyreed.org

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