Men and Mice: Yet Another Cool Meta-Infrastructure Tool

Tonight after work, Brandon, one of the sysadmins at Community Loans of America, told me about an interesting DNS solution called Men and Mice that helps you easily manage your DNS and DHCP infrastructure. Not sure if I’d ever need it (as I tend to rely on Windows for internal DNS and services like DNS Made Easy or EveryDNS.net [donate $20 and you've got unlimited zones and records!] for my external DNS).

The marketing mumbo jumbo on their website:

The Men & Mice Suite is a comprehensive DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management solution built to address the needs of medium to large enterprises. The Men & Mice Suite is the ideal solution for enterprises with Microsoft and Active Directory based networks, as well as those enterprises using Unix and Linux.

It is a challenge to manage a large IP address space, multiple DNS and DHCP servers, and all the users and administrators involved, using only the default management tools. The Men & Mice Suite meets this challenge and is the best tool for solving the scalability, manageability and troubleshooting issues in large network environments.

Deploying the Men & Mice Suite brings many benefits, among them the following three key benefits:

• Non-intrusive, step-wise deployment.
• Clear and integrated view of the whole network infrastructure, with the DNS, DHCP and IP address space merged into one unified updateable view.
• Easy task delegation enabling senior network administrator to safely offload daily network tasks so that they can be managed by local operators or help desk personnel in a secure and professional manner.

These (what I call) “meta”-infastructure tools are where the future’s at, in my not-so-humble opinion. Build out your network with these larger scale configuration tools in place, and you have a tremendous amount of flexibility (e.g. Puppet — which I’m starting to look more seriously at).