First, I got Camping installed, bringing back fond memories of Ruby development. I then copied off the blog example, and created TreeHugger, a 427 line script that provides a web interface to edit the variables, and a plain text output for the shells to source.

This script, when run, allows some simple MVC actions to an sqlite3 database.

As you can see, I have some aliases here I want to send to all the subscribing hosts. Eventually, I want to add some detection functionality to the database (mostly reverse DNS lookups for host rule referencing). I just have to access /out to get my desired output:

# Treehugger Configuration
# Aliases
alias ai='sudo apt-get install'
alias aup='sudo apt-get update'
alias aug='sudo apt-get upgrade'

# Environment Variables

Now, to get this into bash. I looked into making the date command spit out pretty unique timestamps. Turns out you can do this with the nanoseconds format:

$ date +%s%N
1206926780157462141

I made it so wget saves the treehugger config to a tempfile using the somewhat random seed above as a filename suffix, and then I have my shell source it:

FILENAME=/tmp/treehugger-`date +%s%N`; 2>/dev/null wget -O $FILENAME  http://rofl.who/treehugger/out && source $FILENAME && rm $FILENAME

And now I have nice aliases on my laptop served up from my desktop as fresh as the shell:

hank@davros:~$ alias
alias ai='sudo apt-get install'
alias aug='sudo apt-get upgrade'
alias aup='sudo apt-get update'
alias ls='ls --color=auto'

First, you install bind:

sudo apt-get install bind9

I decided to set up bind9 today on my Gutsy server. It wasn’t too painful after I finally found some posts from someone who knew what they were doing (2 tutorials I read contained invalid configurations…).

First, you install bind:

sudo apt-get install bind9

Then, you edit /etc/bind/named.conf:

acl homenet { 192.168.1.0/24; };

options {
  directory "/etc/bind/zones";
};

zone "." IN {
  type hint;
  file "named.root";
};

zone "who" IN {
  type master;
  file "who.db";
  allow-query { homenet; };
};

zone "1.168.192.in-addr.arpa" {
  type master;
  file "rev.1.168.192.in-addr.arpa";
};

This makes an ACL for my home network (192.168.1.1 – 192.168.1.254), sets the directory where my zone files live, defines a zone for the root DNS servers, defines a domain called .who, where all my machines will live, and only allows my home network IP space to query it, and also defines the reverse lookup zone.

Now, I simply had to make the zone files. Here’s what I came up with for zones/who.db:

$ORIGIN who.
$TTL 86400
@   IN  SOA   ns.who. rofl.who. (
    2006081401
    28800
    3600
    604800
    38400
)
                IN      NS  ns.who

                IN A       192.168.1.134
*               IN A       192.168.1.134
rofl            IN A       192.168.1.134
ns              IN A       192.168.1.134
davros          IN A       192.168.1.3

Basically, everything goes to my machine at 192.168.1.134 except things going to davros. It’s lame, but it’s a good template.

Here’s the Reverse lookup zone:

$ORIGIN .
$TTL 86400
1.168.192.in-addr.arpa IN SOA ns1.who. rofl.who. (
                        2006081401;
                        28800;
                        604800;
                        604800;
                        86400
)
     NS     ns1.who.
$ORIGIN 1.168.192.in-addr.arpa.
134    PTR    rofl.who.
3      PTR    davros.who.

Restart the bind service with sudo /etc/init.d/bind9 restart. Also, add it to your /etc/resolv.conf. Try it out like this:

hank@davros:~$ dig davros.who

; <<>> DiG 9.4.1-P1 <<>> davros.who
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 38320
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;davros.who.                    IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
davros.who.             86400   IN      A       192.168.1.3

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
who.                    86400   IN      NS      ns.who.who.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns.who.who.             86400   IN      A       192.168.1.134

;; Query time: 1 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.1.134#53(192.168.1.134)
;; WHEN: Mon Mar 24 23:22:46 2008
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 81

I then added it to my DD-WRT settings on my Linksys WRT54Gv8 router under Setup -> Basic Setup:

My router now simply sends out its IP as the sole DNS server, but routes all the DNS requests to the right spots. Brilliant. Let me know if I did something stupid/wrong…

*.yourdomain.com. IN A 111.111.111.111

But, we ended up using a CNAME instead:

UPDATE ADD *.yourdomain.com. 86400 IN CNAME yourdomain.com

Then in your Apache virtual hosts directive add a wildcard alias like this

ServerAlias *.yourdomain.com

Incredible.

prepend domain-name-servers 63.226.12.96, 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220;

So now, when I use dhcp to grab an IP, I end up prepending these nameservers
onto my resolv.conf. OpenDNS makes spam sites and domain squatters disappear.
And it makes the average request a lot faster.

Yesterday, bish0p and I sat down and started
work on MyDNS. It turns out that the db structure
isn’t all that bad, so it will be fairly straightforward to build a
Rails/Camping interface for it. I already started one in Camping called
Beacon. I was going to name it ChunkyBeacon, but #camping decided
against that.

In other news, I’m going to leave Fairbanks for a while soon. It will be
exciting to go on this adventure into the real world for four months.