Although free is cheaper, most folks looking for DNS management and diagnostic software will find it difficult to find a better price than that offered by Men & Mice.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [January 3, 2003]

Men & Mice was founded in 1990 in Iceland. The company builds DNS management solutions for companies of all sizes, from the smallest SOHO operation to full-fledged ISPs. The company has added training and research services and now issues regular reports on DNS health as well as analyses of important DNS incidents.

Its Domain Health Survey for November, 2002 estimated that over two-thirds of all .com domains are misconfigured, and that many domains still have all name servers on the same subnet.

Problems like these maintain the demand for its software, the core of the company's business, which is built around its Quick DNS solution. Especially popular among Mac OS users, Quick DNS serves up to 500 IP addresses. It can run on Apple's Mac OS, Microsoft Windows (98, ME, 2000, or XP), Linux, HP-UX, Free BSD, or Sun Solaris.

With a simple GUI, the product is designed to make DNS management cheaper and more efficient.

The company's ISP/ASP DNS Management Solution is designed for complex environments. It incorporates support for Bind and for Microsoft Active Directory, as well as diagnostic services. The company says that its software is not proprietary and can be deployed without disrupting current operations.

We spoke to a typical Men & Mice customer, Macintosh specialist Maria's Internet Access, located in Lake Geneva, Wis. Founded in 1997, the company has several subsidiaries including a graphic design business, a Web design business, a hosting company, a dialup business serving 5,700 access numbers in North America and Europe, a DSL business—even a pottery company.

Jeremy Anthony Kinsey, vice president of network operations, said his company has been using Men & Mice since 1997.

"We started out as an all-Mac ISP," Kinsey said. "We had to find a product that would act as a DNS server. It was so easy that it was like working with a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Currently, we also use it on Linux. We still have many Mac OS hosting customers, what we now have Linux hosting customers too."

He found the product convenient and easy to use. "All our DNS servers tie into the admin console, so it's easy to distribute changes if, say, we need to do a mass change of IP addresses. You can do this in Linux with BIND but with QuickDNS it's just point and click. It's also great that it's tied into our billing system, OptiGold from Digital Point. QuickDNS describes the files you're using, so it's easier to see what they are. The console is multi-platform, so I can do work on a Windows laptop or my Apple iBook."

Kinsey said that almost anyone can use QuickDNS. He noted, "of course it's best to have someone who knows DNS, but if you do, you're just filling in fields like on a spreadsheet and clicking 'save' and if you type a record wrong, the program will warn you. You can click on help to find out why, but if you've read O'Reilly, as our folks have, it's just a data entry problem."

He recommended the product to anyone who needs the convenience. "It's not the cheapest because the cheapest is free," he said. "BIND's free and if you can write your own scripts and have the time, then you can do free. We're accustomed to the convenience of it, and we like the fact that it ties into our billing system. I feel it makes us more efficient."

Kinsey warned that it's the simple typos that QuickDNS protects against that cause real problems. He said, "good DNS management is important because keeping track of thousands of zone files (plus some old records) means correcting all the little mistakes. One typo in a DNS record can mean a site does not exist or the domain name doesn't go where it's supposed to go."

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