Entries tagged route53

It is unfortunate that some of the client libraries are inefficient, but I'm enjoying my exposure to Amazon's Route53 API.

(This is unrelated to the previous post(s) about operating a DNS service..)

For an idea of scale I host just over 170 zones at the moment.

For the first 25 zones Amazon would charge $0.50 a month, then $0.10 after that. Which would mean:

25  * $0.50  +
150 * $0.10
             = $12.50

That seems reasonably .. reasonable.

Tags: dns, route53 | 4 comments

The simplest possible DNS-based service which I could write to explore Amazon's DNS offering has to be dynamic DNS, so I set one up..

The record skx.dhcp.io can be updated to point to your current IP by running:

curl http://dhcp.io/set/efa6961c-f3dd-11e3-955b-00163e0816a2

Or to a fixed IP:

curl http://dhcp.io/set/efa6961c-f3dd-11e3-955b-00163e0816a2/1.2.3.4

The code is modular and pretty nice, and the Amazon integration is simple.

(Although I need to write code to allow users to sign-up. I'll do that if it seems useful, I suspect there are already enough free ddns providers out there - though I might be the first to support IPv6 when I commit my next chunk of work!)

Tags: dhcp.io, dns, route53 | 7 comments

I used to work for Bytemark, being a sysadmin and sometimes handling support requests from end-users, along with their clients.

One thing that never got old was marking DNS-related tickets as "resolved", or managing to slip that word into replies.

Similarly being married to a Finnish woman you'd be amazed how often Finnish and Finished become interchangeable.

Anyway that's enough pun-discussion.

Over the past few days I've, obviously, been playing with DNS. There are two public results:

DHCP.io

This is my simple Dynamic-DNS host, which has now picked up a few users.

I posted a token on previous entry, and I've had fun seeing how people keep changing the IP address of the host skx.dhcp.io.. I should revoke the token and actually claim the name - but to be honest it is more fun seeing it update.

What is most interesting is that I can see it being used for real - I see from the access logs some people have actually scheduled curl to run on an hourly basis. Neat.

DNS-API.org

This is a simple lookup utility, allowing queries to be made, such as:

• http://dns-api.org/a/skx.dhcp.io
• http://dns-api.org/aaaa/skx.dhcp.io

Of the two sites this is perhaps the most useful, but again I expect it isn't unique.

That about wraps things up for the moment. It may well be the case that in the future there is some Git + DNS + Amazon integration for DNS-hosting, but I'm going to leave it alone for the moment.

Despite writing about DNS several times in the past the only reason this flurry of activity arose is that I'm hacking some Amazon & CPanel integration at the moment - and I wanted to experiment with Amazon's API some more.

So, we'll mark this activity as resolved, and I shall go make some coffee now this entry is Finnish.

ObRandomUpdate: At least there was a productive side-effect here - I created/uploaded to CPAN CGI::Application::Plugin::Throttle.

Tags: dns, route53 | 5 comments

This post is partly introspection, and partly advertising. Skip if it either annoys you.

Back in February I was thinking about what to do with myself. I had two main options "Get a job", and "Start a service". Because I didn't have any ideas that seemed terribly interesting I asked people what they would pay for.

There were several replies, largely based "infrastructure hosting" (which was pretty much 50/50 split between "DNS hosting", and project hosting with something like trac, redmine, or similar).

At the time DNS seemed hard, and later I discovered there were already at least two well-regarded people doing DNS things, with revision control.

So I shelved the idea, after reaching out to both companies to no avail. (This later lead to drama, but we'll pretend it didn't.) Ultimately I sought and acquired gainful employment.

Then, during the course of my gainful employment I was exposed to Amazons Route53 service. It looked like I was going to be doing many things with this, so I wanted to understand it more thoroughly than I did. That lead to the creation of a Dynamic-DNS service - which seemed to be about the simplest thing you could do with the ability to programatically add/edit/delete DNS records via an API.

As this was a random hack put together over the course of a couple of nights I didn't really expect it to be any more popular than anything else I'd deployed, and with the sudden influx of users I wanted to see if I could charge people. Ultimately many people pretended they'd pay, but nobody actually committed. So on that basis I released the source code and decided to ignore the two main missing features - lack of MX records, and lack of sub-sub-domains. (Isn't it amazing how people who claim they want "open source" so frequently mean they want something with zero cost, they can run, and never modify and contribute toward?)

The experience of doing that though, and the reminder of the popularity of the original idea made me think that I could do a useful job with Git + DNS combined. That lead to DNS-API - GitHub based DNS hosting.

It is early days, but it looks like I have a few users, and if I can get more then I'll be happy.

So if you want to to store your DNS records in a (public) GitHub repository, and get them hosted on geographically diverse anycasted servers .. well you know where to go: Github-based DNS hosting.

Tags: amazon, dns, meta, route53 | No comments