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GoDaddy Proposes New DNS Configuration Standard (programmableweb.com)
GoDaddy has announced "an open set of APIs for DNS providers and web service providers," called Domain Connect. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes:
"Once enabled, customers can quickly configure their domain to point to the web service of their choice with push button simplicity," according to the announcement, "streamlining and simplifying the process of connecting websites and domain names registered on different platforms." GoDaddy's submitted it for consideration as an IETF standard, where they have the support of Microsoft and Squarespace, as well as the other two largest registries, eNome and Name.com. But in the meantime, they told ProgrammableWeb, the specificaion is "out there in the public, open for feedback and adjustment."
"GoDaddy is seeking to take all the friction out of the process," the site reports, "by offering service providers like Squarepace, Wix, Google, Microsoft, Wordpress and others a registrar-agnostic API that they can use to programmatically configure all the necessary DNS entries... in lieu of making end users laboriously crawl through a bunch of forms and then praying that they've done it all correctly." Different access levels will be available based on the service being provided, and for GoDaddy's implementation of the API their senior VP of Domains Engineering "said that the program will not be open to public developers and that any service providers wanting access will have to be approved by his team at GoDaddy."
"GoDaddy is seeking to take all the friction out of the process," the site reports, "by offering service providers like Squarepace, Wix, Google, Microsoft, Wordpress and others a registrar-agnostic API that they can use to programmatically configure all the necessary DNS entries... in lieu of making end users laboriously crawl through a bunch of forms and then praying that they've done it all correctly." Different access levels will be available based on the service being provided, and for GoDaddy's implementation of the API their senior VP of Domains Engineering "said that the program will not be open to public developers and that any service providers wanting access will have to be approved by his team at GoDaddy."
That PRnewswire is the most generic thing I've read in a while
That grabs up any unregistered domain names you happen to lookup and offer them at a premium?
Given the history of Godaddy, I'd be suspicious of any proposal they have about "streamlining" the process...
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Its one of the few thing that has to managed manualy in automated deployments, it would allow orchistration tools like k8s, docker-swarm and mesos to wire up the dns side too.
GoDaddy is one of the worst putting the customer through many pages of up selling attempts.
They can are trying to 'simplify' the only thing they do not profit from.
Hmm, sounds a bit like Amazon Route53 and scripting you can do with the CLI, without the rest of Amazon Web Services.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
... with the easy-to-use web interface that any major provider will give you, then maybe you shouldn't be running your own domain.
Hire someone competent to run it for you.
While you're at it, have them prevent sql injections, install a valid Hhttps certificate, and set file permissions appropriately.
This new process needs to be ABSOLUTELY secure otherwise the script kiddies in addition to all the other hackers will have a field day!
"When a customer wishes to connect a domain, the service provider needs to know who the DNS provider is. To do this, Domain Connect specifies a TXT record be added to the DNS for a domain that specifies a URL that can be called for discovery. The service provider queries the domain for this TXT record (called “DOMAIN_CONNECT”) which, if present, indicates that the domain is served by a DNS provider that supports the Domain Connect protocol. Given the URL, a service provider can call a API endpoint for protocol discovery:
GET v2/{domain}/settings"
I don't like the idea of a TXT record letting everyone know that my domain allows an API to edit it's configuration.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
customers can quickly configure their domain to point to the web service of their choice with push button simplicity
which is already available in plesk, openstack, and godaddys own panel. why do we need to reinvent this shit every year?
"GoDaddy is seeking to take all the friction out of the process,"
what friction? the DNS RFC has been around since 1987, its not some arcane rune stone of indecipherable glyphs. hell, you managed to get it to work in your panel.
GoDaddy's implementation of the API their senior VP of Domains Engineering "said that the program will not be open to public developers and that any service providers wanting access will have to be approved by his team at GoDaddy."
aaaaaand go fuck yourself for trying to make the internet proprietary. you might have swinging dicks backing this idea, but you can expect a shit-storm of legitimate registrars like Dreamhost and register4less to completely ignore this DNS fever-dream you have. Im sure youll support it for 4 years as an option, then quietly shuffle it under the rug of shit that didnt work out like that cloud storage you based entirely off net-app called Nebula.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Seriously, if GoDaddy was to streamline and simplify a process, they should start at home. Remove all your upselling attempts and "oh look, this is surely some bling you MUST HAVE, you'll be the coolest dude in your school" crap. And, lo and behold, you will probably find out what everyone else already knew: That configuring DNS is actually trivial... provided you don't get it from GoDaddy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Don't look now, but I think he took the lead in the RCP average. Are you getting a paycheck from his campaign?
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Oblig XKCD http://xkcd.com/927/
If you've ever been part of a large company and then watched someone divert all traffic to your main site because they social engineered the company in charge of your DNS you might appreciate a little friction.
OK, I admit I'm pretty old school, so I have a serious question. Things like the DNS standard are pretty old, yet extremely fundamental to how the Internet operates. By fundamental, I mean things in the Session layer or below that most web APIs never see...stuff like TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, etc. I'm not a network wizard (I'm a systems engineer) but I did have to learn enough about these things back in the day to get good at troubleshooting.
In the API driven world, you use a JavaScript or similar library to push a JSON, XML or similar file to a URL and wait for a response. If most programmers are working in environments like that, where the connection, name resolution, etc are totally abstracted, are people still learning a healthy dose of fundamentals? If not, I could definitely see this API-driven DNS interface as a response to that. Under the covers everyone knows DNS is required, which will send very specific messages following a standard, over a TCP or UDP connection on port 53. The details of that interaction are what is wrapped by this API, right? So the question is -- as fewer and fewer people know what's actually going on below the API layer, does anyone think this constitutes a problem? I can't argue with a way to make things easier and automate them - I'm just worried about people losing vital context knowledge as we keep wrapping it under millions of layers of code.
GoDaddy and Microsoft...what could go wrong?
Just take my advice and pretend you didn't see this.
I looked over the summary and the two articles they linked do, and I'm trying to understand what problem this fixes. In one article, it says:
For example, imagine setting up an e-commerce website using service providers like Squarespace or Wix and then going back to your Internet registrar to make sure that the domain you just registered is set up to properly point to and respond to the website you just finished building. It's a process that's not for the faint of heart.
... but I really don't know what they're referring to. Changing your DNS records is not particularly difficult. I suppose you need to know what an A record is vs. a CNAME record. Their example of DNS being scary points to a page on how to change your MX records for Google Apps, which... I'm sorry, but if you're configuring MX records, you should have some idea of what you're doing. It's not a particularly difficult process, and if you can't figure that out on your own, you shouldn't be managing your own email services. Get a Gmail address, or else hire someone.
And even more importantly, if you're dealing with someone who can't figure out how to set up an A record, how are they going to set up a TXT record? And should that person really be configuring an API that allows 3rd parties to make changes to their DNS?
One that isn't controllable by a single entity. Perhaps something that mix's Tor like properties and bittorrent like traffic capabilities. You will probably want this done by the end of October.
I thought the company known for domain name front running was Network Solutions. Or is there an article about front running by GoDaddy as well? And has it been a problem since mid-2008 when the tasting fee was introduced?
GoDaddy doesn't have an API to fetch the domains you have in your account - you have to request a report to be run from a batch server - and all you get is the domain name and few tidbits. No A records, no CNAME, no TXT, no MX, nothing actually useful.
If you don't think this is a problem try managing 300+ dedicated tactic URL's that marketing changes every two months. Sure, it's a solvable problem with scripts & bash tools but it wouldn't take them more than a day to give me a CSV download in real time that contained more than just the domain name.
They have an API for their cloud VPS that they didn't write. And now they proudly announce a TXT record auto discovery thingie? Really? It's like putting chrome muffler extensions on a Yugo...
So why is it, dear Slashdot readers, that all domain registrars suck beyond sucking? Their interfaces are klunky and many of them make easy chores more difficult requiring click after click. Go Daddy recently "improved" their interface so it takes two clicks to do what used to take one. Don't even get me started on Network Solutions, they are practically a criminal enterprise...
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