DHCP/DNS Management
This was the project that got the ball rolling with all the other web related projects I've undertaken for the CS Department at UVA. Several of my co-workers
had wanted to make a web front-end to manage DHCP and DNS entries for all the computers in the CS Department. That summer, we just up and did it
one day. My end of this project was just a reliable web form to specify the necessary information for each host, which was then put in a MySQL database. A
Perl script runs every 5 minutes to check the database for new entries, and voilà, we had our semi-automated, user-friendly way to add hosts to our network.
In retrospect, this project was relatively simple but made everyone's life so much easier. No more ssh'ing to the DHCP and DNS server to manually edit config files every time you needed a new host added to the network (which was a daily occurrence). The strict requirements for validation of the input to this form was what got me thinking along the lines of what would become the form class. Also, after creating an Add/Edit/Delete page for mac addresses, ip addresses and host names, it became apparent that there was a lot of redundancy involved. The current version of this system (and all the other bits of data that the System Staff manages) is run using the form class and tablemaker class. But it all started with a very strong desire to not have to edit httpd.conf.