piniontech / chefdns

Chef DNS

ChefDNS

Have you ever gone hunting through knife node list in the search for a particular server's IP? In the habit of keeping a spare AWS tab open so you can copy and paste out public dns names? Written some terrifying shell script to keep your /etc/hosts in sync? Sync no more, my friend, the future has arrived.

On one of my pilgrimages through the darkest jungles of internet history, I found a remarkable and nearly-forgotten system for matching names of things to their ip addresses. The locals call it "DNS". And with nothing but a bit of node magic, you, too, can reap its benefits.

How to make it go

First, have NodeJS installed. Then:

$ git clone https://github.com/PinionTech/chefdns.git
$ cd chefdns
$ npm install
$ knife client create -d chefdns-apiclient -f 'auth.pem'
$ cp conf.example.coffee conf.coffee
$ vim conf.coffee
$ sudo node_modules/.bin/coffee chefdns.coffee # We need sudo to run on port 53

And in another terminal:

$ dig @127.0.0.1 mychefnode
$ dig @127.0.0.1 mychefnode.any.address.com # should work too

It's probably not very useful to just run queries locally, though. ChefDNS works best when you run it on an actual server somewhere and delegate an NS record to it with a short subdomain.

Should I point production traffic at a box running ChefDNS and put my faith in the blinding speed and scalability of DNS-via-HTTP-via-Rails-via-Erlang-via-Postgres?

Sure! I can't imagine how that could go wrong!