Friday, June 21, 2013

A tiny wishlist for Amazon Web Services' Route 53

We've been using the DNS hosting service, Route 53, from Amazon Web Services (AWS). The default port for a DNS server is UDP (and TCP) 53, and I've always presumed that this was the answer to the question:  Why did Amazon name its DNS service Route 53?

In general I like the Route 53 service pretty well.  It's smart how the DNS servers listed for a Hosted Zone (the term AWS uses for a domain hosted in Route 53) reside in different top-level domains, like ORG, NET, COM, and even CO.UK. The UI in the AWS Management Console is fine for managing small zones that contain just a handful of records.

There's one feature that I wish Route 53 had, though, and it would be particularly useful, I think, to research organizations in higher education.

In our grants and contracts there is often a commitment to build, deploy, and operate some technology deliverable.  Often the technology is a web portal of some sort, and the investigator is keen to register a new domain.  This leads to an initial registration of something like:

WhizBangProject.org

The domain may have only the smallest number of records:  an SOA and NS records, of course, and then perhaps an MX record routing mail to a central server, and an A record pointing to the IPv4 address of the web portal.

Soon, though, the researcher may decide to register the same name in different top-level domains, and we have:

WhizBangProject.net
WhizBangProject.com
WhizBangProject.info

joining the mix.  These domains have EXACTLY the same records as the first one, and so if one is running his/her own DNS service, one can configure the DNS server to use the same zone file when loading all of the domains.  This is nice - one file with one set of records to manage for many different domains.

However, it is often the case that the investigator discovers that the original name is not satisfactory, and so we then register an alternate name in several domains:

CoolBeansResearch.org
CoolBeansResearch.net
CoolBeansResearch.com
CoolBeansResearch.info

and maybe a slight variant too:

Cool-Beans-Research.org
Cool-Beans-Research.net
Cool-Beans-Research.com
Cool-Beans-Research.info

In a world where one runs one's own DNS server, the additional domains are not much extra work.  Like the original solution where we pointed the new domains at the same zone file, we can just point these new domains at that same zone file.

I wish Route 53 would let me create a collection of what they call a Record Set, and then apply those same records to an arbitrary set of what they call Hosted Zones.  If the SOA and NS Record Sets were unique to each Hosted Zone, that would be OK; it is really the other records - the ones we add ourselves in Route 53 - that we would want to share across all of the Hosted Zones.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

EMC transfer_support_materials fix for anonymous ftp

Last month I posted about an issue we have been having with our EMC NS 120 NAS.  To re-cap briefly...  When the NS 120 discovers a problem, one action it often will take is to collect up a bunch of diagnostic information, Zip it up, and then use anonymous ftp to transfer it to EMC.  A shell script under the /nas/tools directory called transfer_support_materials does the dirty work. The problem we have been experiencing is rooted in this script; it would fault when trying to transfer the Zip file.

The sequence of ftp commands inside the script is simple:

  1. Connect to ftp.emc.com
  2. Log in using the user name anonymous and a password unique to the NS 120
  3. change directory to /incoming/APMxxxxxxxxxxx (where the string of x's is replaced with the NS 120 serial number)
  4. transfer the Zip file
The script would always fail at step #3 with the message: File unavailable.

The root of the problem is that the transfer_support_materials script expects the directory to exist, but it doesn't.

At first I thought that the problem was with the EMC anonymous ftp server.  I opened several SRs trying to get someone to create the directory.  None of the SRs ever reached a satisfactory closure, and I was left with the impression, Of course the directory doesn't exist; we delete them after a couple of days automatically.

So.....  The tool to transfer diagnostics expects the directory to exist, and the business process at EMC deletes the directory as a routine matter.

At the suggestion of one of my colleagues, I ran ftp by hand, and discovered that it would happily let me create the directory.  That is, I could manually do this:
  1. Connect to ftp.emc.com
  2. Log in using the same credentials as the NS 120
  3. mkdir /incoming/APMxxxxxxxxxx
  4. cd /incoming/APMxxxxxxxxxx
  5. transfer the Zip file
I decided to tweak transfer_support_materials, adding this new element to the existing sequence of ftp commands.  The change is really simple.  This:


#do transfer
LFTPCOMMANDFILE="open -u ${username},${password} $HostName;cd $remote_name;rm -f ${newfile##*/};put $newfile"


becomes this:

#do transfer
LFTPCOMMANDFILE="open -u ${username},${password} $HostName;mkdir $remote_name;cd $remote_name;rm -f ${newfile##*/};put $newfile"


Ran a quick test of the script after this change, and Voila!, it works again.