Anyone who makes use of elegua, the transition of services on it is now complete and I’ve updated the main A and AAAA records to point at the new host.
If you have any issues, you know where to find me.
(That said, the original TTLs were like six gazillion years or something, so caches might flush later as they go. Query the upstream NS for the new record if you need it.)
During a quick conversation on unicode and punycode, I managed to find http://☁→❄→☃→☀→☺→☂→☹→✝.ws
Cute, and a sad reminder of how many people still fight this.
This post could go by the alternative title “Screw you, ISC, and thanks for making software that makes me hate DNS even more”. So let’s dive right in, shall we?
(to those who don’t care for the intermediate ranting and DNS explanations, page down for the tech bits)
There are various criticisms of the Domain Name System — the thing which enables anything on the internet to turn “www.google.com” or any other such name into something that is meaningful to a computer (see here) — but for the most part it works reasonably well. You set up some DNS software, perhaps battle with the config for a while, and then it works. But as a quote I’ve seen somewhere (and can’t find the origin of now with a quick search) says, “you can’t truly recommend some software [tool] until you can tell me why it sucks.” And ISC’s BIND is arguably a highly irritating piece of software, which has over the years led to a rise in popularity for various other options. Amongst these you’ll find some general free/opensource implementations, as well as some commercial platforms:
:: TECH ::
zone2sql tool from pdns) that had some oddities due to what looked like multiple $ORIGIN statements in one file — had been figured out, it was pretty painless to move. There were some fun points, like handling multiple $INCLUDE statements in a zonefile, and *hattip* to Jonathan Hitchcock (for the pre- and post-insert idea) and Bryn Divey (for googling better than I).
cat foo.zone | sed -n '1,/match/p' > firstbit
cat foo.zone | sed -n '1,/match/!p' > secondbit
cat firstbit secondbit > newfoo
# grep INCLUDE 10_in-addr_arpa.zone
$INCLUDE "/var/cache/bind/10_in-addr_arpa.zone.ns";
$INCLUDE "/var/cache/bind/10_in-addr_arpa.zone.mx";
sed -i '/$INCLUDE.*\.ns.*$/ r 10_in-addr_arpa.zone.ns' 10_in-addr_arpa.zone
sed -i '/$INCLUDE.*\.mx.*$/ r 10_in-addr_arpa.zone.mx' 10_in-addr_arpa.zone
ipcalc 11.22.33.0/18 /24 | grep 'Network.*/24' | awk '{print $2}' | cut -d"/" -f 1
11.22.0.0
11.22.1.0
11.22.2.0
...
>>> import dns.reversename
>>> range = "10.22.0.0"
>>> print dns.reversename.from_address(range).to_text().split(".",1)[1]
0.22.10.in-addr.arpa.
>>> d = delimited('foo.bar.baz', '.'); d.sort(); print d
bar.baz.foo
d[1:] -> 'bar.baz'
d[1:2] = ['x', 'y', 'z']; d -> 'foo.x.y.z.baz'
>>> d = delimited('0.2.1.10.in-addr.arpa', '.'); del d[0]; print d
2.1.10.in-addr.arpa.