About NicTool

NicTool and nictool.com is maintained by a team lead by Matt Simerson.

History

NicTool 1.0 was created by Joe Ingersoll, Damon Edwards, and Abe Shelton. Since it's release in 2000, various individuals and companies have been using NicTool to manage their mission critical DNS data.

In 2001, Matt Simerson discovered and began using NicTool while designing an enterprise DNS system for HostPro to manage their 300,000 DNS zones. HostPro purchased a license to NicTool and thereby facilitated development of key features required for large web hosts. Development of the enterprise feature set was led by Greg Schueler under the employ of Damon & Abe and eventually evolved into version 2.00-rc1.

After the release of 2.00-rc1, active development on NicTool ceased. Despite it's dormant development state, NicTool saw perpetual use by HostPro/Interland, The Network People, and others needing a reliable interface to DNS data.

In 2004, Matt Simerson obtained permission from the original authors to open source NicTool and release 2.0 under the Affero-GPL free software license. Thanks to the Matt's tireless efforts and the generosity of Damon, Joe, Abe and Greg, long term development and maintenance of NicTool is now officially open to the public.

In 2005, support for zone templates and batch zone creation was added, making it quick and easy to add zones with common settings.

In 2007, NicTool v2.04 and 2.05 were released, adding Yahoo DomainKeys support and SRV record support. The HTML generation begins a long process of cleanups, starting with removal of all font tags and the inclusion of nt-style.css.

In 2008, AAAA record support was added. Also added crypted passwords for NicTool users.

In 2011, substantial plumbing changes were made under the hood. The primary purposes were to: facilitate the use of DB engines other than MySQL, provide safe and reliable SQL updates, support for split-horizon/DNS views, addition record types (SPF, LOC, DS, DNSKEY, KEY). Another major change was all new exports, which are far easier to set up, and for the first time, BIND exports!

In 2012, NicToolClient got a HTML 5 overhaul. Support for exporting to MaraDNS and a PowerDNS backend were added. Support for single label zones was added (for TLD operators), as well as the ability to import tinydns data files. Paul Hamby contributed BIND zone templates. Support for NAPTR records was added.

In 2013, support for NSD was added.