Re: Is djbdns right for me?

On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 7:49 AM, Tony Primerano
<[email protected]> wrote:
> .foo.com::ns1.mydomain.com:259200
> .foo.com::ns2.mydomain.com:259200

You don't need the ":259200".  That's the default.

> This format is frowned on but it seems the only way to allow me to have 1
> set of nameservers for several domains.

It's not frowned upon, it's just using the add-* scripts do some extra
sanity checking for you.

> Then I add alias N * 2 times (do I need both lines or will *.foo.com lines
> do the trick?)

You need both; *.foo.com does not match foo.com.

Additionally, you can generate your 'data' file from another file, so
you don't need to do the same work manually every time.  E.g., create
a file "domains" with one domain per line, put your existing
mydomain.com tinydns entries into data.extra, and then write a script
data.do:

    #!/bin/sh
    exec <domains
    exec >data.new
    cat data.extra
    while read dom; do
      echo ".$dom::ns1.mydomain.com"
      echo ".$dom::ns2.mydomain.com"
      echo "+$dom:1.1.1.1"
      echo "+$dom:1.1.1.N"
      echo "+*.$dom:1.1.1.1"
      echo "+*.$dom:1.1.1.N"
    done
    exec >/dev/null
    mv data.new data

You can now add a Makefile entry for

    data: data.do data.extra domains
            ./data.do

to regenerate the 'data' file whenever you update domains.

Finally, you'll probably want to edit the add-* scripts to edit
data.extra instead of data.

> Is djbdns right for what I am trying to do?

For what you described, yeah, tinydns is very flexible.  Its data file
format is really well designed for building site-specific scripts like
the one I described above.  (At work, we do something very similar,
but ours is written in Python; I think EveryDNS and other sites use a
MySQL database for maintaining things, and then generate the 'data'
file using a PHP script.)

> One more wrinkle..  I plan on running these servers in the cloud either on
> slicehost or aws.  The IP addresses already have in-addr pointers assigned
> (as far as I can tell)
>
> nslookup 67.23.34.123
>
> Non-authoritative answer:
> 123.34.23.67.in-addr.arpa       name = 67-23-34-123.static.slicehost.net.
>
> is this an issue?

No, it's fine.  Most VPS providers I've used will allow you to setup
the reverse DNS lookup value through a web interface.

> And one final cloud question..   I usually disable root login on my cloud
> hosts,   for now I changed permissions on /service/tinydns/root/data.cdb so
> I can rsync as a different user.   Does anyone else have suggestions on how
> I might do this differently?

That solution sounds fine to me.  (You'll want to change permissions
on /service/tinydns/root as well, because rsync writes to a temporary
file in the same directory first, and then atomically rename(2)s it
over the existing file.)