Introduction

If you have a busy nameserver you might be interested in the traffic patterns and which domains are keeping your nameserver busy.

tinydns-rrd uses rrdtool to make pretty graphs of that kind of thing. You can see some samples here and here.

Get it!

It is available at http://develooper.com/code/tinydns-rrd/tinydns-rrd-0.50.tar.gz.

Configure and install

Unpack the tar file and edit the list of @rrds in the top of the tinydns-rrd file to match the domains you want to make graphs for. You can also just have one entry with a "." regular expression that will catch everything.

For each "rule" you can set log to 1 (true) or 0 (false, the default) to enable or disable logging for stuff matching this rule domain. I find it useful to disable logging for everything except the default rule.

Adjust the paths; the $html_path must be somewhere where your webserver can see it. $img_dir is a relative location to the $html_path.

Now run tinydns-rrd --create to create the initial rrd databases. You can add the --force parameter to overwrite (and clear out!) old databases. Be sure to change owner of the .rrd file so the dnslog user can update them.

Change your /var/service/tinydns/log/run file to something like the following 

#!/bin/sh
exec setuidgid dnslog /path/tinydns-rrd --log -- multilog t ./main

Now you should be updating the rrd files every minute. Use tinydns-rrd --graph to generate the graphs every so often. I have it in my crontab like: 

*/3 * * * * cd p/dns; ./tinydns-rrd --graph

Announcements

The easiest way to get announcements of new versions is to "subscribe" at the Freshmeat page. I might also send announcements of new major releases to the djbdns mailinglist.

Changes

0.50 Apr  9 2002
  - --debug and --nodebug options. The defaults are --debug when the
    tool is run on a TTY and --nodebug otherwise
  - Use .png's instead of .gif's to save a bit of space
  - Stacked graph for all rrds (to give you a graph for the total
    server throughput).

0.41 Mar 12 2002
  - Include timezone in output (thanks to Jonathan de Boyne Pollard).
  - Use -alt-autoscale-max for the rrdtool graph to make it more
    Useful when the graph have significant spikes.
  - Bugfix: write index.html to the $html_path (thanks to Andy
    Dustman).

0.40 Mar 10 2002
  - First public release

partly todo list