About DNSKnife

The project

DNSKnife was developed as part of a project for the University of Applied Sciences in Yverdon-les-Bains (HEIG-VD), in the department of Communication, Engineering and Management (comem+). To design this website we needed a total of six weeks with a team of four working full-time. The project code name was “NSTool” but since there was no available domain name matching that, we named it DNSKnife as good Swiss citizens.

This was an integration project, i.e. a project spanning multiple areas. As second-year students, we had six weeks to demonstrate to the teachers that we were able to use our knowledge in a practical context. During the project, we put into practice the following:

Project management
Object-oriented programming
Web programming
Database administration
Database modeling
Telecommunications
Software design
User interface
Marketing

The team

As stated above, the team is composed of 4 students, each with specific tasks:

Simon Oulevay is responsible for the project’s security, database, abstraction layer, software design and code review.
Steven Moix is responsible for the technical aspects of querying name servers, analyzing RFCs and hosting the site.
Jonathan Rey codes the model and controller layers according to the software design, and provides accessible services to the web interface.
Sven Wagner does the management for the project, and also designs the interface (HTML, CSS, page templating).

Every member of the team will normally finish his studies in august 2009 and will become Engineer in Media orientation Information Technology.

The future of DNSKnife

Now that the project is done and the site is released we hope to get a maximum of registered users. If there is a market, we will continue to develop features.

Technical information

PHP5: The project is coded in object-oriented PHP version 5.
PEAR: The PEAR library is used for authentication, database abstraction and to query name servers.
PostgreSQL: We use PostgreSQL as our database.
Smarty: Templating is done using the Smarty templating engine.
Thickbox: Thickbox is used to display some information in dynamic popups.

Contact

Please contact us at info@dnsknife.com for any question or suggestion. We will be happy to help you or receive feedback or even a sponsorship proposition.