MAPPER(1)

📦
version 2.2.3 · 2 versions
, in fedora 43

🦋 MAPPER(1) 🦋

okay bestie, you've landed on the manual page for mapper — it lives in the User Contributed Perl Documentation corner of section 1, and it's about to make your zone files look good. grab a strawberry something and let's go 💅

✨ NAME ✨

mapper — creates graphical maps of DNS zone data. that's the name, that's the job, no notes. 👑

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

mapper [options] zonefile1 domainname1 ... zonefileN domainnameN

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay so this application literally creates a graphical map of one or more zone files. the output gives you a graphical representation of a DNS zone or zones, and it's written in the PNG format. so yeah — a whole picture of your zone. 🖼️

why do you care? because the result can be useful for getting a more intuitive view of a zone or a set of zones, instead of squinting at text like it's a group chat from 3am. it is extremely useful for visualizing DNSSEC deployment within a given zone, and it also helps you discover problem spots. 👀

🌸 OPTIONS 🌸

  • -h — prints a help summary. short, sweet, helpful.
  • -o OUTFILE.png — saves the results to a given filename. if you don't pass this option, the map gets saved to map.png instead. (that's the default, bestie, memorize it 💖)
  • -r — lists resource records assigned to each node within the map.
  • -t TYPE,TYPE... — adds the data portion of a resource record to the displayed node information. any data types you pass in get automatically converted to upper-case for ease of use, so you don't have to yell in caps yourself.
    • example usage: -t A will add IPv4 addresses to all displayed nodes that have A records. ✨
  • -L — adds a legend to the map.
  • -l (neato|dot|twopi|circo|fdp) — selects a layout format. the default is neato, which is circular in pattern. for further details, go see the documentation on the GraphViz package and the GraphViz Perl module. 📐
  • --node-size=(none|small) — if the map size is too large, you can either greatly reduce the node size (and the text) using --node-size=small, or eliminate the circles entirely, leaving only the arrows, using --node-size=none. this can make for better visual diagrams of very complex node sets, although all labeling is lost. 💀
  • -a — allows overlapping of nodes. this makes much tighter maps, with the downside being that they're somewhat cluttered. maps of extremely large zones will be difficult to decipher if you don't use this option. 🫠
  • -e WEIGHT — assigns an edge weight to edges. in theory, >1 means shorter and <1 means longer, although it may not have any effect as implemented. this should work better in the future. (not the manpage being honest about its own limits 😭)
  • -f INTEGER — uses the INTEGER value for the font size to print node names with. the default value is 10.
  • -w WARNTIME — specifies how far in advance expiration warnings are enabled for signed resource records. the default is 7 days. the warning time is measured in seconds.
  • -i REGEX — ignores record types matching a REGEX regular expression.
  • -s TYPE,TYPE... — specifies a list of record types that will not be analyzed or displayed in the map. by default, this is set to NSEC and CNAME in order to reduce clutter. setting it to "" will display these results again. 🌈
  • -T TYPE,TYPE... — restrict record types that will be processed to those of type TYPE. this is the converse of the -s option. it is not meaningful to use both -s and -t in the same invocation. they will both work at once, however, so if -T specifies a type which -s excludes, it will not be shown.
  • -g — attempts to cluster nodes around the domain name. for "dot" layouts, this actually means drawing a box around the cluster. for the other types, it makes very little difference, if any.
  • -q — prevents output of warnings or errors about records that have DNSSEC signatures that are near or beyond their signature lifetimes. 🤫
  • --dump-styles — dumps the current style settings for both nodes and edges.
  • --node-style=FORMATS
  • --edge-style=FORMATS — allows specific style settings to be used when drawing nodes and edges. major format specifications are delimited by /s and pairs within that are delimited by :s. the first token in a : list is expected to be the record name.

so, for example, to make all A address records appear as a red box and all MX records to appear as a triangle, you use this specification:

--node-style=A:shape=box:fillcolor=red/MX:shape=triangle

run mapper with --dump-styles to show its default settings and/or how you've modified it the options have been used. 🎀

🔥 EXAMPLE INVOCATIONS 🔥

here's where it gets fun, bestie:

mapper -s cname,nsec -i dhcp -L zonefile zone.com

writes to the default file (map.png) of a zone.com zone stored in zonefile. it excludes any hosts with a name containing dhcp and ignores any record of type CNAME or NSEC. a legend is included in the output. ✨

mapper -s txt,hinfo,cname,nsec,a,aaaa,mx,rrsig -L zonefile zone.com
zonefile2 sub.zone.com ...

removes a lot of records from the display in order to primarily display a map of a zone hierarchy. 🦋

mapper -l dot -s txt,hinfo,cname,nsec,a,aaaa,mx,rrsig -L zonefile
zone.com zonefile2 sub.zone.com ...

as the previous example, but this command draws a more vertical tree-style graph of the zone. this works well for fairly deep but narrow hierarchies. tree-style diagrams rarely look as nice for full zones. (real talk 🌳)

Copyright 2004-2013 SPARTA, Inc. All rights reserved. see the COPYING file included with the DNSSEC-Tools package for details.

🫶 AUTHOR 🫶

Wes Hardaker <hardaker@users.sourceforge.net>

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

and that's the whole page, bestie 🧚 this one came to you courtesy of perl v5.42.0, dated 2025-07-23 — go make some maps, you ate 💅💖

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