The IP Manager is a tool we created in order to manage our DNS zone files.

Working on those manually is time consuming and many of the parameters (most, actually!) are repeated between all the different files. Not only that, you are much more likely to have (many) mistakes.

Instead, the ipmgr command line tool reads configuration files and transforms them in Bind9 compatible zone files. It also takes care of restarting bind9 when something changed.

Ultimately, we would like to use the rndc and nsupdate tools to dynamically create zones and add sub-domains to them. However, our attempts at using those tools at the time we created ipmgr did not succeed. Setting up the permissions properly seems to require quite a bit of work. Note that although we do not use those tools, the ipmgr configuration files can be setup for dynamically updateable zones. This is important in various situations such as automatically setting up an SSL (TLS really now) certificate with letsencrypt.