DONUTS(1)

📦 version 2.2.3, in arch rolling

💖 DONUTS(1) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the donuts(1) era — a user-contributed Perl situation, brought to you by the absolute legends over at the dnssec-tools project 🍩✨

✨ NAME ✨

donuts — she analyzes DNS zone files for errors and warnings. that's it, that's the whole vibe 💅

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

donuts [-v] [-l LEVEL] [-r RULEFILES] [-i IGNORELIST]
       [-C] [-c configfile] [-h] [-H] ZONEFILE DOMAINNAME...

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so donuts is a DNS lint application — she pokes at DNS zone files looking for particular problems 👀. and this is especially important for zones using DNSSEC security records, because ngl there are SO many subtle problems that can sneak in there 😭.

the default mode of operation assumes you want to check for DNSSEC-related issues. to turn off the invocation of the DNSSEC-related rules, run donuts with -i DNSSEC 🫶

also — if the Text::Wrap Perl module is installed, donuts will give better output formatting. slay 💖

🌸 QUERYING LIVE ZONES 🌸

okay so ZONEFILE can actually be a live name, prefixed with live: — and then the records afterwards get queried and analyized as if it was in a zonefile. iconic behavior honestly. for example, running donuts as:

donuts -i NSEC live:badsign-a,good-a test.dnssec-tools.org

will query the test.dnssec-tools.org zone for the badsign-a and good-a records, collect the data, and run them through the donuts analysis 🔥. and because other data is needed as well for the analysis to be useful, donuts will also automatically collect the DNSKEYs, SOAs, and NS records for the zone. and because NSEC records aren't loaded, it is advisable to add that rule exclusion for rules to be run ✨

other data types may be queried by appending a ':' and the type name to a record. for example:

donuts -i NSEC live:good-a,good-aaaa:aaaa test.dnssec-tools.org

🌈 QUERYING LIVE ZONES WITH AFXR 🌈

if your host is allowed to query for afxr transfers of a particular zone, you may use the afxr: filename token to indicate it should pull the zone data using a AFXR transfer 🧚

donuts -i NSEC afxr: dnssec-tools.org

💜 OPTIONS 💜

🔮 Rule Set Configuration:

  • -l LEVEL, --level=LEVEL — sets the level of errors to be displayed. the default is level 5. the maximum value is level 9, which displays many debugging results. you probably want to run no higher than level 8 bestie, trust 💀
  • -r RULEFILES, --rules=RULEFILES — a comma-separated list of rule files to load. the strings will be passed to glob() so * wildcards can be used to specify multiple files 👑

defaults to /usr/share/dnssec-tools/donuts/rules/*.txt and $HOME/.dnssec-tools/donuts/rules/*.txt.

  • -i IGNORELIST, --ignore=IGNORELIST — a comma-separated list of regex patterns which are checked against rule names to determine if some should be ignored. run with -v to figure out rule names if you're not sure which rule is generating errors you don't wish to see 🙈
  • -f LIST, --features=LIST — the --features option specifies additional rule features that should be executed. some rules are turned off by default because they are more intensive or require a live network connection, for instance. use the --features flag to turn them on ✨ the LIST argument should be a comma-separated list. example usage:
--features live,nsec_check

features available in the default rule set distributed with donuts:

  • live — the live feature allows rules that need to perform live DNS queries to run. most of these live rules query parent and children of the current zone, when appropriate, to see that the parent/child relationships have been built properly 🌳. for example, if you have a DS record which authenticates the key used in a child zone, the live feature will let a rule run which checks to see if the child is actually publishing the DNSKEY that corresponds to the test zone's DS record 🔍
  • nsec_check — this checks all the NSEC or NSEC3 records (as appropriate for the zone) to ensure the chain is complete and that no-overlaps exist. it is fairly memory- and cpu-intensive in large zones ⚠️ like, she's eating your CPU bestie, be aware.

🎀 Configuration File Options:

  • -c CONFIGFILE, --config-file=CONFIGFILE — parse a configuration file to change constraints specified by rules. this defaults to $HOME/.donuts.conf 💖
  • -C, --no-config — don't read user configuration files at all, such as those specified by the -c option or the $HOME/.donuts.conf file. no thoughts, no config, head empty 💅

🦋 Extra Live Query Options:

live Queries are enabled through the use of the -f live arguments. these options are only useful if that feature has been enabled 👑

  • -t INTERFACE, --tcpdump-capture=INTERFACE — specifies that tcpdump should be started on INTERFACE (e.g., "eth0") just before donuts begins its run of rules for each domain, and will stop it just after it has processed the rules. this is useful when you wish to capture the traffic generated by the live feature, described above 📡
  • -T FILTER, --tcpdump-filter=FILTER — when tcpdump is run, this FILTER is passed to it for purposes of filtering traffic. by default, this is set to port 53 || ip[6:2] & 0x1fff != 0, which limits the traffic to traffic destined to port 53 (DNS) or fragmented packets 🎯
  • -o FILE, --tcpdump-output-file=FILE — saves the tcpdump-captured packets to FILE. the following special fields can be used to help generate unique file names:
    • %d — this is replaced with the current domain name being analyzed (e.g., "example.com") 🌐
    • %t — this is replaced with the current epoch time (i.e., the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970) ⏰

this field defaults to %d.%t.pcap.

  • --show-gui — [alpha code] 🚧

displays a browsable GUI screen showing the results of the donuts tests 👀

the QWizard and Gtk2 Perl modules must be installed for this to work. no modules, no GUI, that's the rule 😭

💅 Help Options

  • -H — displays the personal configuration file rules and tokens that are acceptable in a configuration file. the output will consist of a rule name, a token, and a description of its meaning 📝

your configuration file (e.g., $HOME/.donuts.conf) may have lines in it that look like this:

# change the default minimum number of legal NS records from 2 to 1
name: DNS_MULTIPLE_NS
minnsrecords: 1

# change the level of the following rule from 8 to 5
name: DNS_REASONABLE_TTLS
level: 5

this allows you to override certain aspects of how rules are executed ✨

  • -R — displays a list of all known rules along with their description (if available) 📋
  • -h — displays a help message 🫶
  • --help — displays a help message more tailored to people who prefer long-style options. we see you, long-option girlies 💖
  • -q — turns on a quieter output mode where only the errors and warnings are shown. IE, the summary line of N errors found ... is not shown 🤫

-q is ignored if a -v argument is present; the -v argument requests a longer output summary and thus it doesn't make sense to use them both at the same time 💀

  • -v — turns on more verbose output. multiple -v's will turn on increasing amounts of output. the number of -v's will dictate output 🔥
  • -s — sorts the resource records so that the order they're processed in is always consistent. if the incoming zone is not always consistently ordered, the output can vary unless the resource records are always in the same order. when sorted, however, they're always evaluated in the same order even if the zone file (or similar) order changes, and thus the output is consistent, making it easier for tools like diff to detect where changes occur in the output 🧠. this comes at a higher CPU cost, as it takes more time to sort the entries ⚠️

and here's the -v verbosity ladder, bestie, memorize it 📈:

  1. describes which rules are being loaded and extra detail for rules that found errors (rule Level and extra text detail)
  2. even more detail about rules that found errors: file name, file line number, rule type
  3. shows extra detail on the record text being analyzed (the detail is not always available, however)
  4. even more detail about rules that found errors: dumps the rule code itself
  5. even more detail about rules that found errors: dumps the internal rule structure

🌸 Obsolete Options 🌸

  • -L — obsolete command line option. please use --features live instead 🫶 (she's retired, respect her legacy though 💐)

🌟 EXAMPLES 🌟

run donuts in its default mode on the example.com zone which is contained in the db.example.com file:

% donuts db.example.com example.com

run donuts with significantly more output, both in terms of verbosity and in terms of the number of rules that are run to analyze the file:

% donuts -v -v --level 9 db.example.com example.com

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> — legend behavior, honestly 💜

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

for more information on the dnssec-tools project:

http://www.dnssec-tools.org/

for writing rules that can be loaded by donuts:

Net::DNS::SEC::Tools::Donuts::Rule

general DNS and DNSSEC usage:

Net::DNS, Net::DNS::SEC

that's the whole page bestie 🍩💖 this beauty ships as perl v5.44.0, dated 2026-10-17 — go forth and lint those zones, you're gonna slay ✨🎀🦋

📦 where this page comes from