Ping-Status App Documentation

Overview

The Ping-Status App is a web application that fetches and displays information about the online status of hostnames within a specified DNS zone. The app allows users to view the hostnames that were never online, hostnames created today, and the ping status of all hostnames in the DNS zone.

Features

1. Display a list of hostnames that have never been online.
2. Show hostnames created today.
3. Show the ping status of hostnames within the specified DNS zone, including their IPv4 addresses, status, and timestamps.

Technical Implementation

The Ping-Status App is built using FastAPI, a modern, fast (high-performance) web framework for building APIs with Python. The app uses the dnspython library to query DNS records and retrieve the required information.

Dependencies

• dnspython>=2.3.0
• fastapi>=0.94.1
• Jinja2>=3.1.2
• uvicorn>=0.21.1
• Python >= 3.7

I conducted testing on macOS M2 and Ubuntu 1804 using Python 3.11.2.

Directory Structure

.
├── app
│   ├── main.py
│   ├── templates
│   │   ├── base.html
│   │   ├── index.html
│   │   ├── navbar.html
│   │   ├── never_online.html
│   │   └── today.html
│   └── util
│       └── dns_helper.py
├── requirements.txt
└── README.md

Usage

1. Install the required dependencies using the requirements.txt file:

pip install -r requirements.txt

1. Run the application using Uvicorn:

uvicorn app.main:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000

1. Access the application at http://localhost:8000/.

Application Structure

The application consists of the following components:

• main.py: The main file that sets up the FastAPI app and handles routing.
• dns_helper.py: Contains the HostARecords class, which fetches the DNS records.
• templates/: A directory containing the Jinja2 HTML templates for each page:
  • base.html: The base layout template that other templates extend.
  • index.html: The template that shows the ping status of hostnames in the DNS zone.
  • navbar.html: Navigation
  • never_online.html: The template that displays hostnames that have never been online.
  • today.html: The template that displays hostnames created today.

Customization

To customize the application for a specific DNS server and zone, modify the following values in the dns_helper.py file:

dns_server = "your_dns_server_address"
zone_name = "your_zone_name"

Replace your_dns_server_address with the IP address or hostname of your DNS server, and your_zone_name with the name of the DNS zone you want to query.

Future Improvements

1. Add authentication and user management to restrict access to authorized users.
2. Provide support for IPv6 addresses.
3. Implement pagination for displaying large sets of hostnames.
4. Add filtering and sorting functionality to the hostname tables.
5. Extend the application to support additional record types and DNS zones.