Thursday, October 04

Geek

You Can't CNAME A Zone

Damn.

One of the neat features of Minx is that it runs across multiple servers, and it doesn't matter which server you end up on - any site can be served by any server.

For mee.nu and mee.fm this works just fine; I just set up the DNS for those domains with multiple wildcards and I get round-robin load balancing for as many domains as my users create.

With mu.nu it's a little trickier, because I have a few hundred pre-existing zone files.  The easiest thing would be to change each zone file as I migrate the blogs, and CNAME that domain to mu.nu except for email.

Except that you can't do that.  I'm not sure exactly why it's forbidden, but it is indeed forbidden.  I can still create one or many A records to target the servers, but then I have the server IPs defined in a few hundred zone files, at least until the migration is complete and I can drop CPanel.

Hosting personal domains (non-mee/mu) is even worse.  Redirects will work, of course, but redirects are ugly.  Putting in the IP addresses will work too - until the IPs change.  Delegating your DNS to my servers will work, but then I have to look after a squillion zone files, and you can't easily point your email elsewhere unless I write a DNS management front end.

Bleh.

Anyone know of a better way to do this?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:24 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 243 words, total size 1 kb.

1 I'm going to take it as a given that you can't create a new zone file for each blog as it's moved (as opposed to changing it)

Can you have the IP defined in a single separate file that is called by the zone file? That way you would only have the one file instead of all those ditzy files with an IP in them.

Sorry, I'm pretty much "hosting" illiterate.  I wish I could think of something else. *sigh* 

Posted by: Teresa at Thursday, October 04 2007 01:20 PM (rVIv9)

2 For mu.nu I could drop the zones and just have a wildcard in the mu.nu zone itself.

Unfortunately, that won't work for personal domains.  When I saw the CNAME trick - you can CNAME one hostname to another hostname - in a different domain - which is mapped to multiple IPs (for round-robin load balancing) and it all works magically - I was overjoyed.  (If you can parse that sentence, you're a geek.)

But as I discovered today, you can't do that for the domain itself, only for hosts within the domain.

Bleh.  Okay, I sort of understand why now, but bleh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, October 04 2007 09:36 PM (PiXy!)

3 I've no idea, but as an FYI my site is down.  11:30a EST. 

Oh, I've redone my headers and footers so that it hopefully decreases server load with php inquiries. grin

Love the fun comment thingys.

Posted by: pam at Friday, October 05 2007 01:31 AM (l6NIn)

4 Hi Pam.  Sorry, I just noticed the server problem.  Trying to log in and fix it now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 05 2007 03:01 AM (PiXy!)

5 I seem to be down, too...guess I have to go read the Puppy Blender...

Posted by: Susie at Friday, October 05 2007 03:11 AM (TvU1Z)

6 All fixed now!

I'm going to try the migration to the new server again this weekend.  We've really outgrown the old one, and things are only going to get worse if I keep putting it off. sad

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 05 2007 03:21 AM (PiXy!)

7 Thank you, Pixy!  You're the bestest.  

Posted by: pam at Friday, October 05 2007 03:31 AM (l6NIn)

8 Thanks, Pixy! 

Posted by: Susie at Friday, October 05 2007 03:35 AM (TvU1Z)

9

Pixy,

Have you had any trouble using the web-palette for selecting colors? When I choose "more colors" the pop-up window comes up ok, but when I select a color and click "add custom color", it just puts black into the custom palette. I think it's because black refuses to give up the "new" box.

Also, clicking "remove" closes the window entirely.

Thanks,

Posted by: Will at Friday, October 05 2007 06:55 AM (WnBa/)

10 Hmm.  I haven't used the web palette much.  I'll play around with it a bit and see what I can come up with.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 05 2007 07:41 AM (PiXy!)

11 If you're using bind, you can at least define the IP addresses in one file and $INCLUDE it into the migrated domains.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, October 05 2007 11:49 AM (9Nz6c)

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