Service/Nameservers

Hostmasters

To request changes to DNS records, contact <hostmaster AT sugarlabs DOT org>

Current hostmasters are:

• Bernie Innocenti
• Stefan Unterhauser

Registered nameservers

The following nameservers are currently registerted in whois records for our domains:

(FIXME: this is what it should look like after the current transitional mess)

hostname	aka	location	IPv4	IPv6
ns1.sugarlabs.org	lightwave	FSF, Boston, USA	140.186.70.102	2002:8cba:4666::1
ns2.sugarlabs.net	sunjammer	FSF, Boston	140.186.70.53	2002:8cba:4635::1
ns1.codewiz.org	trinity	Develer, Firenze, Italy	83.149.158.210	2002:5395:9ed2::1
ns2.auth.osuosl.org	-	OSU-OSL, Seattle, USA	140.211.166.141	-

Note that ns2.auth.osuosl.org is not under our control and does not serve all our domains.

Editing zone data

We use distributed version control and admin scripts to arbitrate edits to the zone files and nameserver configurations. DO NOT EDIT THESE FILES LOCALLY, ANY CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTEN.

Checkout nameserver config

To simplify merging, each hostmaster pushes to a separate branch:

git clone lightwave.sugarlabs.org:/var/lib/bind/etc/bind ns

Do not checkout the repository as root. Your user needs to be in group bind.

FIXME: use a separate group hostmaster rather than bind.

Edit zone data

Guidelines for editing zones:

• Please keep the zone files tidy, by following indentation style

• Add comments as needed to describe obscure records in the zone files

• Remember to keep reverse zones always up to date

• Bump the serials after each update!

Push changes back to master nameserver

• Commit your changes, possibly with a meaningful comment:

 git commit -a -v

• Then, push your changes:

 git push

• We have a handy post-receive hook to automate the rest of the procedure:
  • send a notification email to systems-logs@;
  • checkout your changes to the bind configuration directory;
  • make BIND reload its configuration;
  • watch BIND's log file to ensure slaves are actually transferring the changed zones.

Push changes to slaves

If you add or remove domains to the named-sugarlabs-masters.conf, you also need to synchronize named-sugarlabs-slaves.conf and propagate it to slave nameservers.

./update-named-slaves

FIXME: ssh keys needed for other admins

Implementation details

• The git config file is as follows:

[core]
       repositoryformatversion = 0
       filemode = true
       bare = false
       shared = true
       logallrefupdates = true
       worktree = /etc/bind
[receive]
       denycurrentbranch = ignore

[hooks]
       mailinglist = bernie@codewiz.org
       emailprefix = "[DNS] "
       showrev = "git show -C %s; echo"

• We use a post-receive hook to checkout the zones to the local sandbox and make BIND reload them:

#!/bin/bash
/bin/bash /usr/share/doc/git-core/contrib/hooks/post-receive-email
git checkout -f
tail -n0 -f /var/log/daemon.log &
/etc/init.d/bind9 reload
sleep 3

• For slightly better security, the repository lives outside the sandbox