Install dnsviz with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• dnsviz

Project history

DNSViz was developed by Casey Deccio while at Sandia National Laboratories to help administrators understand and troubleshoot DNSSEC deployments after DNSSEC became a practical operational requirement for many zones.

The public dnsviz.net service was already being highlighted by the Internet Society in 2011 as a free DNSSEC testing tool operated by Sandia, and Sandia described the project publicly in January 2012.

The open-source tool suite later settled around the dnsviz GitHub organization. The repository describes the package as the tool suite that powers the web-based DNSViz analysis service.

Adoption history

DNSViz spread through the DNSSEC operations community because it solved a concrete deployment pain: showing why a chain of trust failed and which records or name servers were involved.

It is packaged by multiple Unix-style package managers, including Homebrew, Debian, Fedora, MacPorts, Nix, and Ubuntu, which points to use beyond the hosted site by operators who want local or automated DNSSEC checks.

How it is used

Users can submit a domain to dnsviz.net for a visual DNSSEC analysis, or install the CLI to run probes and generate analysis locally.

The tool is used for DNSSEC pre-deployment testing, post-deployment troubleshooting, and explaining DNSSEC authentication chains to humans who need more than raw dig or delv output.

Why package nerds care

DNSViz sits in the small but important class of DNS tools that are not just query clients: it captures DNS behavior, models validation, and renders the result as an operator-facing graph.

For package metadata, it is a good example of a command-line package whose identity is inseparable from a long-running public web service.

Timeline

• 2011: Internet Society Deploy360 documented DNSViz as a Sandia-operated DNS visualization tool for DNSSEC testing.
• 2012: Sandia published a project story describing Casey Deccio's DNSViz work for DNSSEC troubleshooting.
• 2014: GitHub releases show the 0.1.0 open-source release line for dnsviz.
• 2024-2025: Later releases modernized dependencies, including replacing M2Crypto with cryptography and fixing dnspython compatibility.

Related projects

• Related DNSSEC diagnostics include Verisign Labs DNSSEC Debugger, delv from BIND, drill from ldns, and the broader dnspython ecosystem used by many DNS analysis tools.
• DNSViz also has a separate dnsvizwww repository for the web front end around the analysis engine.

Sources

• https://dnsviz.net/
• https://github.com/dnsviz/dnsviz
• https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/deploy360/2011/testing-dnsviz-a-dns-visualization-tool-3/
• https://newsreleases.sandia.gov/dnsviz/
• https://github.com/dnsviz/dnsviz/releases
• https://github.com/dnsviz/dnsvizwww