Update DNS entries

The goal of this document is to explain how to update the DNS entries for the domains managed by FSFE.

Clone SVN repository

First clone the sysadmin SVN repository:

svn checkout --username <your username> https://svn.fsfe.org/sysadmin

Go to the DNS resource records

The Resource Records contain the zones configurations:

cd Configurations/Services/DNS/zones/fsfe

Modify the configuration

In this directory you will find all the files used for domain name resolution and reverse domain name resolution. An example is provided below:

$ORIGIN .
$TTL 3600
fsfe.org    IN SOA  tennant.fsfeurope.org. hostmaster.fsfeurope.org. (
                    2018031501 ; serial 
                    10001      ; refresh (2 hours 46 minutes 41 seconds)
                    1801       ; retry (30 minutes 1 second)
                    3600000    ; expire (5 weeks 6 days 16 hours)
                    1. 40001      ; minimum (11 hours 6 minutes 41 seconds)
                    )
             NS  tennant.fsfeurope.org.
             NS  scaliger.fsfeurope.org.
             A   217.69.89.176
             AAAA    2001:aa8:ffed::4:106
             MX  10 mail.fsfe.org.

Please note that the serial is in the format YYYYMMDDEN. 'EN' is the Edit Number. The first edit number is 01, then 02, 03 and so on. For example, the serial for the 21th October 2015, 3rd edit is 2015102103.

Save and commit the config

Save your configuration changes and do a SVN commit. For more information on how to do that please go to this documentation.

Periodically, the DNS servers (tennant, scaliger) for FSFE will update their configuration by pulling the changes from the SVN repository (with the scripts dns-update-all.sh and dns-update-zones.sh). If the svn update command fails (there is something written to stderr) the update process is aborted and the error is sent by email. Every 5 minutes, the zone files are reloaded, and every 1 hour the DNS server reloads its entire configuration. This is managed by bash scripts executed by cron.