DNS Staying With The Times

eric — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:00:42 +0000

My company signed a contract for a provider that uses TZO as their DNS provider. Now I have used TZO before (circa 2006-2007) and although their interface was archaic and there was no API, I accepted it because I was told they were reliable. As it happens, the service was fantastic and they are very reliable. I don’t think the service went down once the entire time I was using them. I ended up leaving the company and never saw the API or new interface come to fruition.

Fast forward 3+ years to 2010 and my current company is setting up our domains on TZOs portal which (despite the promise) hasn’t been updated at least since 2006. That’s fine, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But the problem is, it is broke. I couldn’t even an a TXT record. Then when I asked about it on a Friday, didn’t receive an answer until Tuesday. And that only because I pushed for it. In 2010, how can a major DNS managed service provider not have support for adding arbitrary TXT records? And they additionally don’t even have an API to make calls to so it can be done outside of the interface.

I don’t know how many clients in total they have lost, but I know the answer is at least 1. So this forced us (my company) to look around for another provider. After looking at a bunch of them and bringing in price and functionality into the mix, we believe that we have decided on Dynect. It is so far one of the best bang for your bucks that we have come across. Between myself and a few people on staff, we have experience with a few different providers (mostly small) and none of them cut it. We ruled out the big ones like UltraDNS since they were cost-prohibitive. But Dynect has all the major features that we are looking for:

Multiple Anycast servers
API
Relatively usable interface
DNS Load Balancing capability with health check
Reporting (either via API, graphs, or logs)
Geo Load Balancing
Full management control (including the ability to add TXT records)

The moral of the story is twofold; 1) poor support goes a long way, just as great support goes a long way, 2) sometimes reliable service only gets you so far. These items were the tipping point for us to go somewhere else. This goes back to something I hear 37signals tell people all the time, “Don’t expect other people to use and pay for something that you wouldn’t use and pay for yourself.” I just can’t see the people at TZO thinking the same old interface is still usable years later.

Being Smart is all about Being Resourceful

Creating a Slave DNS Server on Bind9

eric — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 16:10:13 +0000

I couldn’t find a quick and dirty list of commands for setting up a slave DNS server so I figured I would just throw it together.

Starting with a fully working primary name server, we are going to set up a slave name server. We are going to make the following assumptions:
primary – 1.2.3.4
slave – 4.5.6.7
* We want to have the domain example.com have a slave name server

On the primary (or master) name server, add the following lines to the options section.

options {
allow-transfer { 4.5.6.7; };
notify yes;
};

Ensure that you update the serial number in the SOA on the master. Then run:

# rndc reload

On the slave name server, add the following entry to the named.conf file (or whichever file houses your zone entries). Ensure that the path leading up to the zone file exists and that bind has write access to that directory.

zone "example.com" { type slave; file "/etc/bind9/zones/example.com.slave"; masters { 1.2.3.4; }; };

Then once you made the changes to the slave, you will need to reload the configuration. Do this the same way you did on the master:

# rndc reload

If you watch your DNS log, you should see the transfer happen as soon as you restart both named servers.

Erics Tech Blog » dns

DNS Staying With The Times

Creating a Slave DNS Server on Bind9