• Regdel
• ChiMailMadmin

I’m also planning on porting these ones as well:

• Nextoclock
• Internet Floor Plans

I’ve actually done some work on porting YoDNSConf to Rails3, but there is still plenty to do. Feel free to contact me via github if you’re interested in helping out with this open source project and learning about the awesomeness of Rails 3!!

UPDATE: I’ve made much progress, and YoDNSConf will soon have a public service for checking DNS for hostnames, similar to how DNS stuff used to work.

For example, it will check the nameservers from public DNS resolvers, ensure that mx records are hostnames and not IP addresses, and that a www A record exists.

I hope to have it operate ghost, the rubygem that makes it sort of easy to manipulate one’s /etc/hosts file.

Ghost works in harmony with the trend in commands and sub-commands issued on the command line. Joey Hess describes the trend well in his post: command composition.

Perhaps the yodnsconf gem could work something like this:

yodns list example.com
+-----------------------+------+-------+------+
| zone                  | type | ttl   | name |
+-----------------------+------+-------+------+
| www-c.evenserver.com. | IN   | 28800 | www  |
| www-b.evenserver.com. | IN   | 14400 | www2 |
+-----------------------+------+-------+------+

It should be able to access a dotfile for settings, and be able to do some globbing, as well. I’m torn about how it should, or could do some caching of the zonefiles, to either a database (like a sqlite3 db), or to a json file, or something similar.

I’ve spent a couple hours on this and its actually working already. Awesome!

Next Steps

I’m planning on including grit for git / ruby revision control, and I’d really like to make the process much more interactive.

So far I am using Trollop, and its working very well. The DSL is a little clunky; seems like I have a lot of “Trollop::options” in my code:

    cmd_opts = Trollop::options do
      opt :type, "Record type", :default => 'a', :short => '-t'
    end 

UPDATE: I’ve created a github repo for this. NOTE: Its still alpha.

• https://github.com/docunext/yodns

Yes... that's what I've done. I setup a private DNS zone which contains A records for every zone file I manage. Actually, I'm switching to TXT records, as even though I could achieve this with AXFR requests, I believe it will be simpler with TXT. Something like this:

$ORIGIN example.priv8.
$TTL 12h
@  1D  IN  SOA  ns1.example.com. email.example.com. (
              2010061201
              28800
              7200
              604800
              2400
              )
names 1 IN TXT "example.info"

While YoDNSConf can manually parse the file, other consumers of this data will be able to query the DNS server. I'd like to keep the service private, and I might be able to, but for convenience, I'll probably just use a zone that is incompatible with the internet at large (something without a .com, org, net...) and setup stub zones for my DNS resolvers.

First I've added some fields for back-end proxy server addresses for zone groups. This can be used to create routing paths for reverse proxies like NGINX or Pound, as well as mail relays for Postfix and popmap.re files for Perdition. So far I've only created templates for NGINX.

NOTE: While I currently use Perdition, I plan to switch to Dovecot at some point.