We are whitelabeling some website software, but in order to use it, our clients must point their domains to the software's nameservers. We'll say ns1.softwareco.com and ns2.softwareco.com.
Since we're whitelabeling, I don't want our clients to see Software Co's name in the name servers.
I could easily mirror Software Co's DNS settings, but if Software Co updates them in the future, my settings would be incorrect.
Is it possible to just point my nameservers ns1.whitelabelco.com and ns2.whitelabelco.com to Software Co's nameservers?
Your best way of achieving this is to follow the lead of other companies.
For example, if you look at how github allows the configuring of custom domain names for their pages product. Which is whitelabelling in effect.
The two options you have are basically, that you have a static IP address that will last for the lifetime of your service. Which would mean you would need to buy that address, complete with a contract to ensure it didn't need to be changed. You could place that address infront of load balancers etc, so it could be directed to multiple servers at the backend (even multiple locations)
The simpler option is to offer a CNAME redirection to your clients.
You tell your clients that you have service.example.com and they should point their servers to that with a CNAME record. so their clients will see www.domain.com but that will be redirected to your site.
The downside of a CNAME record over an IP Address, is that the end user can see that it is a whitelabel product. The problem is that DNS is an open system, and no matter what you do with it the end user will be able to see what you've done and find out that you are hosting that site.
The only way around that is to use an IP Address.
Related
I have a random number of domains (sub.client1.example, sub.client2.example, etc.) that I ask my clients to delegate to my name servers through a NS record.
The configuration for every delegated domain should be exactly the same (a CNAME to a fixed domain that we own and a record for SSL validation).
How to configure my DNS servers to accept requests for any domain name and return the correct configuration for it? Is there a hosted service like Route53 or DynDNS that would provide vanity name servers with support for that use case?
You are not saying with which nameservers.
With most of them, like Bind, you can write your zonefile in such a way that the domain name itself does not appear in the labels.
Basically you write www CNAME www.whatever.example and the missing dot at the end of www forces the nameserver to automatically add the domain name.
So with a zonefile written like that, you can configure your nameserver for all domain names it should be authoritative on and use that same exact zonefile.
This is one among many other options.
To be a little more on-topic for this programming Q&A website you could also:
use a nameserver that allows to use as source, instead of a static text file, content of a database (that some program of yours could fill in) or even directly a program that will get called to reply to each DNS packet
use some templating mechanism and some program to build all zonefile text files from other sources (like a database) before starting the nameserver.
Note that the first case with a "generic" zonefile text file is by far the easiest so that should be your first try.
Of course various providers on line could give you the same features more or less, starting with your registrar that could give you DNS hosting also. But it is also achievable by yourself if you agree to install and maintain a nameserver.
Also, you do not need any vanity server to do all of that, and I recommend you to just not follow that leads as it will not give you any kind of benefit.
I would like to create a subdomain off of my main domain for accessing my raspberry pi at home. My domain register company charges £10 for every subdomain so I thought there might be an easier (and cheaper) way of creating one. It would also help if I knew a little more about them and how they are created.
DNS is built off of a hierarchy for scale-ability and/or for granularity.
If we take the a domain like www.stackoverflow.com. and break it down, here is what we get.
www - This is the host portion of the domain. It is either an A record or a CNAME and eventually points to an ip address.
stackoverflow - This is one of the domain levels. It has it's own DNS servers and config managed by the stackoverflow team. This allows that team to manage the entries specific to their needs.
com - This is called a TLD (top level domain). All other domains that end in .com have an entry on the "com" dns servers.
. - This is called the ROOT. There are 20 somodd root DNS servers scattered around the world. These servers are used to identify where the .com, .org, .edu, .gov, etc dns servers are.
From a client perspective what happens when you query www.stackoverflow.com is:
You query the . name servers to ask where the com dns servers are.
You query the com dns servers to ask where the stackoverflow dns servers are.
you query the stackoverflow dns servers to ask where www is.
A subdomain simply means that you add an additional layer of DNS servers in the mix so that you can add more scale-ability and/or granularity to the mix.
For example, if our dns name is: www.foo.stackoverflow.com we would now have the foo dns server layer.
Having said that, I do not think that you need a subdomain. You probably just need an additional DNS A record or CNAME. For example:
raspberry.stackoverflow.com instead of raspberry.foo.stackoverflow.
They should not charge extra for additional host entries (A record or CNAME), only for subdomains.
I work for Johns Hopkins University, and our web culture here has been an unruled wilderness for many years. We're trying to get a handle on the enormous number of registered subdomains across our part of the web-universe, and even our IT department is having some trouble tracking down the unabridged list.
Is there a tool or a script that would do this quickly and semi-easily? I'm a developer and would write something but I want to find out if this wheel has been created already.
Alternatively, is there a fancy way to google search, more than just *.jhu.edu or site: .jhu.edu, because those searches turn up tons of sites that use "jhu.edu" in the end of their urls (ex. www.keywordspy.com/organic/domain.aspx?q=cer.jhu.edu)
Thanks for your thoughts on this one!
The Google search site:*.jhu.edu seems to work well for me.
That said, you can also use Wolfram Alpha. Using this search, in the third box click "Subdomains" and then in the new subdomains section that is created click "More".
As #Mark B alluded to in his comment, the only way a domain name (sub or otherwise) has any real value is if a DNS service maps it to a server so that a browser can send it a request. The only way to track down all of the sub-domains is to track down their DNS entries. Thankfully, DNS servers are fairly easy to find, depending on the level of access you have to the network infrastructure and the authoritative DNS server for the parent domain.
If you are able to, you can pull DNS traffic from firewall logs in and around your network. That will let you find DNS servers that are being sent requests for your sub-domains.
Easier though would be to simply follow the DNS trail. The authoritative DNS server for your domain (jhu.edu) will have pointers to the other DNS servers that are authoritative for sub-domains (if your main one is not authoritative already).
If you have access to the domain registrar and have the proper authorization, you should be able to contact technical support and request the zone file or even export it yourself depending on the provider.
I currently have my own domain name and dedicated server and I offer different packages to my clients. What I want to be able to do is have them sign up with my website and create a package automatically that they can access via their username as a subdomain e.g.
http://yourusername.mywebsite.com
I currently have DNS entries set up for various subdomains with real information for my website e.g.
Name Type IP Address
# A 1.2.3.4
bugs A 1.2.3.4
support A 1.2.3.4
However, if a new customer signs up at the moment I have to go and manually create an entry for them with their username in it.
I'm sure I've seen websites that manage to do this automatically, does anyone have any ideas how, or any other methods that I should be using?
Thanks,
Mark
Since you apparently do not control the name servers, your choices are quite limited. One possibility is to use a wildcard DNS record:
* A 192.0.2.1
where the star will replace every name. Not ideal (inexisting domains will also appear).
The details depend on which DNS server you're using.
One approach is to have some code that opens the DNS zone file and adds the desired records. On Linux with Bind, you will then need to signal the server to get it re-read the zone file.
With Simple DNS Plus, you can easily add such a DNS record through the included HTTP API. For example:
http://127.0.0.1:8053/updatehost?host=yourusername.mywebsite.com&data=1.2.3.4
Since you apparently do not control the name servers, your choices are quite limited. Nevertheless, every serious DNS hoster provide you with a API (see for instance Slicehost's API). So, you may use this API and write a small program to update the DNS data.
(Foot note: handling paying customers when you do not even control the name servers seem... bad)
I was wondering if it's possible to dynamically add subdomains that point to dynamic IP addresses, and how I would go about doing that? In other words, "how is dyndns/no-ip implemented" :-)? (The part I don't get is adding/changing the DNS entries... I understand how the client sends a packet every few minutes -___-). I can tell all my users to just use DynDNS/No-IP, of course, but having it integrated with the application would be much cooler.
Thanks,
Robert
To be able to directly update/control where a domain/subdomain resolves to, you must have your own name server. When you register a domain under a TLD (for example, .com), that TLD has a nameserver. Anytime a client needs to look up the IP to something.com, they ask the .com nameserver where to find the nameserver for something. That nameserver in turn returns data about the domain or subdomain.
When you register a domain at a place like GoDaddy or Network Solutions, and you use their online tools to point your various subdomains to IP addresses, you are creating entries on their nameserver. When a client requests your domain, the root nameserver tells them to check with GoDaddy's nameserver. If you look through the configuration options of your registrar, you'll generally find a place to specify your own nameserver instead of entering domain IPs. Setting that will tell the chain of nameservers to defer resolution of your subdomains to that nameserver. Obviously at that point, having direct control over the mechanism of name-address resolution, you can do whatever you like.
Here's one list of open-source name servers. There are many others, ranging from free OSS to custom, proprietary and very expensive. Technically you could also write your own, as BIND is a public, standard format.
As you've partially said, the way DynDNS and other dynamic IP services work is that they update their server's DNS records based on a heartbeat from a client every few minutes.
The trick is that they use extremely short TTL times so that caches for the record expire very quickly and need to re-query the DynDNS server (which makes dynamic IP changes propagate quickly).
If you wanted to implement this, either find a DNS host that offers an API, or programatically update the DNS on your own server with a short TTL.