dsc(1)

💖 dsc — DNS Statistics Collector 💖

okay bestie, welcome to dsc(1), from the General Commands Manual section. this is the girlies' guide to scooping up stats from your very busy DNS servers. let's get into it ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

dsc — DNS Statistics Collector. that's it, that's the name, iconic. 👑

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

dsc [ -dfpmiTv ] dsc.conf

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so, DNS Statistics Collector (dsc) is the tool you use for collecting and exploring statistics from busy DNS servers. like, busy busy. it can be set up to run on or near your nameservers and it'll generate aggregated data that you can then transport over to central systems for processing, displaying and archiving. it's giving "data pipeline main character energy" fr fr 💅

together with dsc-datatool, that aggregated data can be furthur enriched and converted so you can import it into, for example, InfluxDB — which can then be accessed by Grafana for visualzation. (yes, "furthur" and "visualzation" are spelled exactly like that in the official page, i don't make the rules 💀). here's the wiki on how to set that whole thing up:

https://codeberg.org/DNS-OARC/dsc-datatool/wiki/Setting-up-a-
test-Grafana

dsc will chroot to a directory on startup and output statistics into files in various formats. very secure, very demure ✨

and if you wanna know how to configure dsc, what formats exist, their structure, and what the output filenames look like — go read dsc.conf(5). that's the manual for that. 🫶

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

one bullet per flag, no skips, no cuts, we stan completeness:

• -d — Debug mode. Exits after first write.
• -f — Foreground mode. Don't become a daemon.
• -p — Don't put interface in promiscuous mode.
• -m — Enable monitor mode on interfaces.
• -i — Enable immediate mode on interfaces.
• -T — Disable the usage of threads.
• -D — Don't exit after first write when in debug mode.
• -v — Print version and exit.

💡 okay so -d and -D are besties but not twins — -d alone dips out after the first write, and -D is what keeps it around even in debug mode. iykyk.

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🍓 FILES 🍓

• /etc/dsc/dsc.conf — Default configuration file for dsc

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• dsc.conf(5)
• dsc-datatool(1)

go read those next, bestie, they're the sequels 📚

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

the legends who built this:

• Jerry Lundström, DNS-OARC
• Duane Wessels, Measurement Factory / Verisign
• Ken Keys, Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis
• Sebastian Castro, New Zealand Registry Services

Maintained by DNS-OARC

https://www.dns-oarc.net/tools/dsc

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😭 KNOWN ISSUES 😭

okay so this one matters, pay attention.

this program and/or components uses select(2) to wait for packets, and there may be an internal delay within that call during startup that results in missed packets. like, you're literally losing packets at the starting line. not the vibe. 💀

as a workaround, set pcap_thread_timeout (see dsc.conf(5)) to a relevant millisecond timeout with regards to the queries per second (QPS) received.

here's the math the page gives you, so you can do it yourself:

for example, if your receiving 10 QPS then you have 20 packets per second (PPS), and if spread out equally over a second you have a packet per 50 ms, which you can use as timeout value.

since version 2.4.0 the default is 100 ms. periodt. ⭐

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🙈 BUGS 🙈

for issues and feature requests please use:

https://codeberg.org/DNS-OARC/dsc/issues

for question and help please use:

admin@dns-oarc.net

don't be shy, they're nice 🫶

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and that's the whole page, babe. this was dsc(1) from the DNS Statistics Collector, version 2.16.1, dated as of the dsc(1) manual page. slay, go collect some stats 💖✨🎀