I wanted to get a fi-domain as I am building a site for our housing company. It’s very much a pro bono work, but interesting nevertheless. To be honest, this is the first time I have to register a fi-domain and man, it’s not as easy as getting a com or similar domain with DynDNS etc. You need to be a Finnish citizen to be allowed to get one for starters and made sure you are not violating any possible trademarks or even more, some real people with your domain name.
I would perhaps been ok if a DynDNS type of service would exists (well, now as I write this it probably does) in Finland, but the ones I came across were mostly just taking orders and not like dynamically updating their resources… but can’t of course be totally sure. Anyway, I decided to give Amazon Route 53 a go as it is new and I do appreciate the possibility to update the records on command line. Or well, I perhaps did not investigate really too much before signing up.
First I had to though register the fi-domain with Ficora and that took around a day to get the credentials on paper. Yes. On paper. The next step was to register the name and give them two (at this point fictious) name servers. Then I was on my way to Route 53. The first look at the Getting Started Guide is not very encouraging. Need to create some files which contain the access keys and the actual requests. Need to run a perl script to actually create the records. Good thing I bought my first Mac just a few months ago as with Windows this would have sucked.
So the first thing was to create the .aws-secret file which contains your AWS Secret Access Keys it looks something like this:
%awsSecretAccessKeys = (
“my-keys” => {
id => “JISEGIOJDFGSLSDKFG”,
key => “KSLDFSDFGSDFGSasdfsdASFDSDF”,
},
);
And it really needs to be named .aws-secret and have only read permissions as the dnscurl.pl checks this.
Then create the zone you have registered:
<CreateHostedZoneRequest xmlns=”https://route53.amazonaws.com/doc/2010-10-01/”>
<Name>YOURDOMAIN.fi.</Name>
<CallerReference>SOMETHINGRANDOMHERE</CallerReference>
<HostedZoneConfig>
<Comment>Creating first zone</Comment>
</HostedZoneConfig>
</CreateHostedZoneRequest>
Then download dnscurl.pl from the AWS developer tools and run it with these parameters:
dnscurl.pl –keyname my-keys — -X POST -H “Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8″ –upload-file MyCreateRequest.xml https://route53.amazonaws.com/2010-10-01/hostedzone
You should get something like this in return:
<CreateHostedZoneResponse xmlns=”https://route53.amazonaws.com/doc/2010-10-01/”><HostedZone><Id>/hostedzone/34LJSKFSJGSDFKJ</Id><Name>YOURDOMAIN.fi.</Name><CallerReference>JIjasdmfasfw4af3233</CallerReference><Config><Comment>Creating first zone</Comment></Config></HostedZone><ChangeInfo><Id>/change/23ILKSFJDLSK</Id><Status>PENDING</Status><SubmittedAt>2011-01-24T20:48:47.715Z</SubmittedAt></ChangeInfo><DelegationSet><NameServers><NameServer>ns-1778.awsdns-30.co.uk</NameServer><NameServer>ns-372.awsdns-44.com</NameServer><NameServer>ns-1621.awsdns-38.org</NameServer><NameServer>ns-534.awsdns-04.net</NameServer></NameServers></DelegationSet></CreateHostedZoneResponse>
Here are the real name servers which I had to give to Ficora and it happily said them being ok, so fi-domain is well supported by AWS! Yey!
Then you can start adding records to your zone. First need to create the MyRecordsRequest.xml for the records which could look like this:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<ChangeResourceRecordSetsRequest xmlns=”https://route53.amazonaws.com/doc/2010-10-01/”>
<ChangeBatch>
<Comment>
Create A-record
</Comment>
<Changes>
<Change>
<Action>CREATE</Action>
<ResourceRecordSet>
<Name>www.yourdomain.fi.</Name>
<Type>A</Type>
<TTL>14400</TTL>
<ResourceRecords>
<ResourceRecord>
<Value>192.0.0.111</Value>
</ResourceRecord>
</ResourceRecords>
</ResourceRecordSet>
</Change>
</Changes>
</ChangeBatch>
</ChangeResourceRecordSetsRequest>
dnscurl.pl –keyname my-keys — -H “Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8″ -X POST –upload-file ./MyRecordsRequest.xml https://route53.amazonaws.com/2010-10-01/hostedzone/34LJSKFSJGSDFKJ/rrset
And you should get a response like this:
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<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<ChangeResourceRecordSetsResponse xmlns=”https://route53.amazonaws.com/doc/2010-10-01/”><ChangeInfo><Id>/change/C3FMNWCVL1YW40</Id><Status>PENDING</Status><SubmittedAt>2011-01-25T19:16:24.181Z</SubmittedAt></ChangeInfo></ChangeResourceRecordSetsResponse>
I got a few problems with “root is not authorized to perform: route53:ChangeResourceRecordSets on resource” because I did not have ./ in front of the MyRecordsRequest.xml, so remember to have it there.
Tags: Amazon AWS, Ficora, Route 53
