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Best DNS Service With API Access?
netaustin writes "My company runs quite a few media websites, mostly on Drupal, and about half on ec2. We have a good server setup with ec2 which allows us to route requests through Pound, a cluster of Varnish servers, then a cluster of Apache servers. We manage 50 domains (one per state) like this. Problem is, anytime things change, we have to manually adjust DNS for all 50 states, which is very boring and usually causes negative side effects too as we can't ever adjust all 50 DNS entries at once. We'd like to just change DNS providers and be done with it, but there are a lot of options, and I don't often shop for DNS services. I use EveryDNS for my personal domains, but I don't think they provide an API and it'd feel a little dishonest to reverse engineer the forms on their site since they're an esteemed donations-based service. I wouldn't feel bad about doing that to DNSPark, but they have a CAPTCHA image accompanying their login form, so goodbye DNSPark. I found a couple services that seem to do what I'm looking for, but they both feel a bit Microsoft-y and since I only want to change once, I want to get this right. Advice?"
DynDNS.
That was easy.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
It sounds like it's time to run your own dns servers. For what you're trying to do I recommend powerdns with either a mysql or postgres backend. You can do massive updates with regular sql update syntax very quickly and anything that can talk mysql can update it ... perl, php, ruby, etc ... you name it.
EveryDNS provides a "secondary DNS" service. If you can set up your own primary server, EveryDNS will clone it.
NearlyFreeSpeech.net has an API to control DNS records.
If you don't mind running your own master DNS server like this poster recommends, DNS Made Easy has a very cheap and very redundant IP anycast based DNS service that we use for all corporate sites. For dollars a month you could have access to their nameservers, which run all over the world. Other services offer similar enterprise DNS functionality, but comparing performance with price, we haven't been able to find a better deal yet.
I've been using ZoneEdit for years and they're great. Free for small domains, and really cheap for huge domains. It never, ever breaks. And it's super easy to work with.
afraid.org will do everything he wants and then some, been using them for over 5 years now with no problems. check it out
Me, too. (That means "mod parent up")
You can use DNSpark (whom I use) or other providers as slaves. Your master doesn't even need to be publicly accessible, just as long as you allow the appropriate zone transfers. This way you can have your own little scripts that generate the zone files on a host you fully control, while having the world query those professionally managed servers.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
1) Install and DNS server that supports what is technically called 'dynamic updates' and make sure that the updates can be authorized by keys. This server will be internal.
2) man nsupdate
Here, I'll even do this step for you: http://linux.die.net/man/8/nsupdate
3) Set the public facing DNS servers to transfer the zones from your internal DNS server.
4) Tada.
Using ISC BIND, I've setup my zones in a similar fashion. I configured the zone update authorization to be key based instead of IP based.
nsupdate uses no special magic, just RFC based standards to allow zone updates. If nsupdate doesn't fit your bill (and it should, it allows you to batch updates and send them), you can roll your own.
Keep in mind that 'dynamic update' doesn't mean 'low TTL value.' You can set it to whatever you please, it just means that you can updates records without any special zone magic.
Great infrastructure, robust, API, good people. I've been using them for around nine years now - http://ultradns.com/ - highly recommended.
Uhh sed can do that you know. hint: -f
GoDaddy dba WildWest has an API, but we seem to have ended up being guinea pigs for it, and it didn't go well. Their documentation had features that didn't exist, promised 24-hour turnaround on support failed, ...
It's working OK now, but I can't really recommend it.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
I highly recommend DNS made easy: https://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/s0306/res/ddnsc.html I use them with a bunch of serves on EC2 and it works like a charm.
What sort of load can the DB backend handle? Does it use caching? There's a DLZ-bind mod out there, but it executes at least one SQL query for every DNS query; which can't handle even moderate load.
"who would you go to for DNS glue records?"
If really needed, your DNS registrar will do.
"you need DNS glue from someone above you in order for those DNS servers to be valid."
No, you don't.
"Or has stuff changed since I last did this a few years back?"
No, it hasn't.
You only need glue records... when you need glue records. For a NS that means only if the name server for a domain happens to be within the same domain (so NS for example.com is for instance ns.example.com). On the typical scenario DNSs will be something like ns1.mycompany.com, ns2.mycompany.com and they will serve i.e. onestate.com, othercompany.com and the like. No glue records involved.
Go Daddy will take down your domain if they hear a peep about it, and cause all sorts of trouble. http://nodaddy.com/ I'd just run NSD and serve them from in-house (maybe get an external VPS as a slave).
It isn't all that hard you know...
And even a pretty busy DNS server doesn't require vast hardware resources. You already obviously have a hosting infrastructure, etc. Bind 9 can serve up a LARGE amount of DNS requests on a couple of fairly low end machines.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson