Category: Uncategorized

Deploying a standalone DNS Server using PowerDNS

In the next few weeks I will be deploying a new DNS server, standalone, with a custom control panel.

It is using PowerDNS.  The panel is written in PHP and located on the webserver, not the new DNS box.  The only non-DNS service I am running is MySQL, this is where PowerDNS gets its zones from.

I have have started work on coding the panel to also support slave DNS servers, however not using “notify” built into DNS servers, rather using the panel to create Master & Alias servers.  This just replicates the data across more than one server.  Much simpler to setup and all of the software exists in standard debian repositories (I think, if not I will also be adding details on adding new ones to the list)

Please do be aware though, I will not necessarily be releasing all of the source code for this, however there will be tutorials on writing it yourself, as well as a few scripts & commands to run to get your current BIND based zone files into the MySQL database of your new setup.

Server Issue, made worse by spam

Well, I’d like to apologise for current outages across many of my sites. Having some serious server performance issues. As the problem seemed to be getting resolved, another website of mine is being attacked by spam. Over 50 comments couple of minutes.

PHP & Django FCGI processes are not able to spawn, if its there, the site might work…slowly that is. I expect everything to be completely sorted over the next few hours. When everything starts working normally, I have a few posts to make across some of the other sites. Updates when I can.

Update: As the server issue slowly sorts, the rate of spam increases.  Fun times.  The server would normally handle the spam issue without any hit to the servers performance. (Its not really that many requests under normal conditions)

Update: All sorted.  Apparently the issue was caused by another VPS having some serious disk access to the shared SAN.  I can accept that causes problems, however, I’m surprised that there is no monitoring in place for this sort of thing.

mootoolrocks.com up

Well mootoolrocks.com is now up.  It works, which is the most important thing right now.  Has a couple of Hints & Tips on it, a section which I may be renaming to snippets, or something.  Send me suggestions for code.  I do have a few snippets to do, less than 10 lines each I think, but other suggestions are always good.

MooTools Rocks….coming soon

Over the next few days I will be putting up MooTools Rocks, just like Django Rocks….but MooTools.

There will not be a great deal of stuff on there to start with, but at least a few snippets to get things started.

Welcome

Well, I shall start with the welcome post.

Hello all, for more about me, go to the about page.

Dansette