So today I decided to take it along to work, and spend an hour or so, in the afternoon testing it out. Well that plan was out of the window it seemed this morning. Super fog for most of the day. Hmm so much for summer, aye?

Above is a picture from just outside my office, of Tower Bridge, hmm nice sunny day

Also been playing with DNS today. Just one of the things, on my huge list of todo’s, learn BIND. Not the most interesting things to know, but still, quite useful. Also annoyed by the fact that my registra for my personal domain (this one) gives you a maximum of 5 entries, per account. So if you had 5 domains, you can only have 5 A/MX/CNAME/NS/TXT…etc records between them. 1and1 Suck!  Avoid at all costs. Also they refuse to change their TTL’s to anything but 1 day. Also not too useful, especially if you’re like me, and like to play quite a bit.

Anyways, so the idea was to have 3 name servers, one in London, one in Essex, and one in Paris. All authoritive, one being the master, with two automatically updating slaves. Getting the servers and zone files over to it was pretty straight forward, there were a few things, I clearly hadn’t read the RFC’s in clear enough detail about. I knew a root record had to be an A record. However I didn’t know that if you have a sub-domain, i.e. luke.sheldrick.co.uk and you have anything else, i.e. MX’s on that sub-domain, that too had to be an A record, rather than a CNAME.

Once I’d patched the slaves, allowing axfr’s (Didn’t realise for slaves, I had to stipulate allow-tranfer to be none, as BIND’s default is allow-transfer to any, it was time to migrate.

The only thing I was slightly worried about was an0key.net is this zone, would be hosting it’s own NS’s. So normally when you do a DNS lookup, you DNS client will ask one of the root servers, where to go, it will then (depending on you domain, i.e. .com will go to the gtld’s. .co.uk will go to nominet), and then they will hand you off to your registra’s name servers, who will give you the records.

As the name servers, of an0key.net will be ns0/1/2.an0key.net, when the gtlds, hand over, your client will ask say ns0.an0key.net what address www.an0key.net has, but to get to ns0.an0key.net it has to know it’s ip, so you end up in a loop.

This is where you setup what is know as a “Glue” record, whereby the gtlds, will kindly hold the A records of my ns0/1/2.an0key.net. There is a pretty good write up on wikipedia on how it all works.

If you’re reading this, then it’s safe to say that, my DNS servers haven’t packed up yet, or haven’t been poisened. If however this site, is now paypal, and you’ve got to give me your credit card, pin number, D.O.B, bra size…etc then pitty you!

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