GoDaddy Proposes New DNS Configuration Standard (programmableweb.com) 81
GoDaddy has announced "an open set of APIs for DNS providers and web service providers," called Domain Connect. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes:
"Once enabled, customers can quickly configure their domain to point to the web service of their choice with push button simplicity," according to the announcement, "streamlining and simplifying the process of connecting websites and domain names registered on different platforms." GoDaddy's submitted it for consideration as an IETF standard, where they have the support of Microsoft and Squarespace, as well as the other two largest registries, eNome and Name.com. But in the meantime, they told ProgrammableWeb, the specificaion is "out there in the public, open for feedback and adjustment."
"GoDaddy is seeking to take all the friction out of the process," the site reports, "by offering service providers like Squarepace, Wix, Google, Microsoft, Wordpress and others a registrar-agnostic API that they can use to programmatically configure all the necessary DNS entries... in lieu of making end users laboriously crawl through a bunch of forms and then praying that they've done it all correctly." Different access levels will be available based on the service being provided, and for GoDaddy's implementation of the API their senior VP of Domains Engineering "said that the program will not be open to public developers and that any service providers wanting access will have to be approved by his team at GoDaddy."
"GoDaddy is seeking to take all the friction out of the process," the site reports, "by offering service providers like Squarepace, Wix, Google, Microsoft, Wordpress and others a registrar-agnostic API that they can use to programmatically configure all the necessary DNS entries... in lieu of making end users laboriously crawl through a bunch of forms and then praying that they've done it all correctly." Different access levels will be available based on the service being provided, and for GoDaddy's implementation of the API their senior VP of Domains Engineering "said that the program will not be open to public developers and that any service providers wanting access will have to be approved by his team at GoDaddy."
Re: Great (Score:1)
GoDaddy and Microsoft...what could go wrong?
Just take my advice and pretend you didn't see this.
Newswire (Score:2)
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That's because it's nothing more than a clearinghouse for corporate PR flacks.
Anyone (and I mean that in an almost literal sense) can put a press release out on that site without editing if they become a member of the site. No, I'm honestly not kidding about that: http://www.prnewswire.com/solu... [prnewswire.com]
This the same godaddy (Score:1)
That grabs up any unregistered domain names you happen to lookup and offer them at a premium?
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Yup - but they're not the only player to do it. Most of the big registrars will snarf up names (especially expired ones) register them, and park them on an empty generic server full of marketing blurbs to their site... only to resell them to you for an additional price.
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GANDI.net don't. Plus WHOIS masking is free, set by a checkbox (usually already ticked) and they don't charge you through the nose for trendy TLDs such as .io
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Io is trendy? I thought we weren't allowed to land there?
Network Solutions was front running 8 years ago (Score:3)
I thought the company known for domain name front running [wikipedia.org] was Network Solutions. Or is there an article about front running by GoDaddy as well? And has it been a problem since mid-2008 when the tasting fee was introduced?
Given the history of godaddy... (Score:5, Interesting)
Given the history of Godaddy, I'd be suspicious of any proposal they have about "streamlining" the process...
Re:Given the history of godaddy... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Given the history of godaddy... (Score:2, Funny)
Flynt
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Re:Given the history of godaddy... (Score:5, Informative)
"Mod me that insightful please."
They seized domains of their customers on the slightest of claims, e.g. unverified "this domain spammed me" claims, GoDaddy cancels domain under their usage policy.... sells on to mysterious customers who hide behind "DomainsByProxy" (i.e. GoDaddy subsidiary), when they've been investigated.... they find the domain is held by mysterious companies such as "Standard Tactics LLC" (i.e. other GoDaddy companies)....
But hey the mysterious new owner is prepared to sell you it back for $$$$ (3 or 4 figure numbers) if you act now!
Perhaps they're clean now, but go try their website with a test domain before using them on a real domain. Even searching on a domain name can get it speculatively registered by a 'mysterious' customer hidden behind DomainsByProxy who happen to register it through GoDaddy.... so use a test domain name, register it for $0.99 as promised in their ads and see how much you end up paying in the long run for dealing with those .
Or take the advice of people who've dealt with them. It is not worth the risk, go use a proper registrar like Tucows, or a proper DNS+Registrar package like EasyDns.com NEVER GoDaddy. NEVER EVER GoDaddy.
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The company where I work was bought, and the new owner instructed us to migrate a lot of our services to GoDaddy. Some of the things we migrated were Domain registration, and Email services. The GoDaddy email services LOOKED like IMAP services that we could connect to with our current email client, but when it came down to it, it didn't support all the IMAP features. There were conspicuous limitations like: you are unable to create more than 10 folders off the ro
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They seized domains of their customers on the slightest of claims, e.g. unverified "this domain spammed me" claims
I think what they do these days, is if there's a spamming complaint, they "lock" the domain, turn off resolution, and to get it turned back on you'll have to pay a $199 Administrative fee to re-activate the domain, or a $99 fee to allow you to transfer the domain to another registrar.
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It may just amplify the amount of malware and phishing sites by having the API redirect "taken over" sites.
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It's the internet. Everyone already got a free ticket.
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Given the history of Godaddy, whatever they think is a good idea surely is not. They have a severe competency deficit over there.
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That's true. Especially taking into account their support of SOPA and PIPA. That alone is a good enough reason to refuse anything from them, ever.
This is great for devops, automated deployments (Score:2, Interesting)
Its one of the few thing that has to managed manualy in automated deployments, it would allow orchistration tools like k8s, docker-swarm and mesos to wire up the dns side too.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Automated deployments existed before Docker became a fad. I've been able to programmatically configure DNS for years now at AWS Route53 and DNSimple. I'm sure there are others that offer some form of API.
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... I'm sure there are others that offer some form of API....
Lots of DNS providers have their own API to access and edit the zone data. What would really be cool would be if there were one [real, IETF] standard API to access and edit the zone data. That would make it a lot easier to move my DNS around to different vendors, or to find open source tools to help me manage my DNS, regardless of which provider I use.
As much as I have had bad experiences with GoDaddy, even they may be able to come up with a good idea every once in a while.
GoDaddy is on the worst upsellers (Score:1)
GoDaddy is one of the worst putting the customer through many pages of up selling attempts.
They can are trying to 'simplify' the only thing they do not profit from.
Sounds like.... (Score:4)
Hmm, sounds a bit like Amazon Route53 and scripting you can do with the CLI, without the rest of Amazon Web Services.
If you can't configure DNS (Score:2)
... with the easy-to-use web interface that any major provider will give you, then maybe you shouldn't be running your own domain.
Hire someone competent to run it for you.
While you're at it, have them prevent sql injections, install a valid Hhttps certificate, and set file permissions appropriately.
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... with the easy-to-use web interface that any major provider will give you, then maybe you shouldn't be running your own domain.
Hire someone competent to run it for you.
While you're at it, have them prevent sql injections, install a valid Hhttps certificate, and set file permissions appropriately.
Spoken like somebody who knows his job can easily be taken over by automated systems.
What a strange comment. Hiring someone who can competently run it implies hiring someone who can automate it.
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Yeah, because any time that we re-spin VMs that have a completely automated bootstrap script using something like Chef, I want to *manually* adjust DNS. It's especially fine having a manual process if you are using a tool like AWS CloudFormation where you could potentially have HUNDREDS of instances spawning when creating the stack, or the stack could automatically create / remove instances based on load.
You are a fucking idiot.
Security (Score:2)
TXT record?? (Score:5, Insightful)
"When a customer wishes to connect a domain, the service provider needs to know who the DNS provider is. To do this, Domain Connect specifies a TXT record be added to the DNS for a domain that specifies a URL that can be called for discovery. The service provider queries the domain for this TXT record (called “DOMAIN_CONNECT”) which, if present, indicates that the domain is served by a DNS provider that supports the Domain Connect protocol. Given the URL, a service provider can call a API endpoint for protocol discovery:
GET v2/{domain}/settings"
I don't like the idea of a TXT record letting everyone know that my domain allows an API to edit it's configuration.
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Besides, it should be an SRV record, not a TXT record, so that it can include what host and port the API endpoint is at without having to parse free-form text.
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A SRV record cannot provide the full HTTPS directory and location of the API to be used, which doesn't allow for multiple versions of the API and multiple API endpoints.
A TXT record with a URI is just fine too for location of a HTTPS-based service down to the subdirectory level. If you want a SRV record, it should be a SRV record on the hostname referenced by the UR as in _https._tcp SRV blah blah blahI; however, the URI can just use the standard Port 443 for a HTTPS URL, or an alternate port can
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:clearly they havent heard (Score:5, Insightful)
GoDaddy's implementation of the API their senior VP of Domains Engineering "said that the program will not be open to public developers and that any service providers wanting access will have to be approved by his team at GoDaddy."
aaaaaand go fuck yourself for trying to make the internet proprietary. you might have swinging dicks backing this idea, but you can expect a shit-storm of legitimate registrars like Dreamhost and register4less to completely ignore this DNS fever-dream you have. Im sure youll support it for 4 years as an option, then quietly shuffle it under the rug of shit that didnt work out like that cloud storage you based entirely off net-app called Nebula.
Don't worry. If everybody follows GoDaddy's example, then nobody can interoperate and this protocol is dead in the water. They're basically hoping that competitors will let them take "their" domainnames while paying lipservice to supporting the protocol themselves.
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what friction? the DNS RFC has been around since 1987, its not some arcane rune stone of indecipherable glyphs. hell, you managed to get it to work in your panel.
I know nothing about this proposed solution beyond what the summary provided, and I share your anti-GoDaddy feeling in general.
There is, however, a problem that needs to be solved when transferring domains from one registrar to another. I've dealt with many different registrars over the years, and none of them do this the exact same way. Sometimes they don't support authorization codes, other times the destination can't process the codes properly, and the transfer request times out at the source. I'd lov
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This doesn't affect registrar-to-registrar transfers. Just makes it easier for any registrar to use someone else's web hosting.
GoDaddy doesn't make much money from domain name fees - they want up-sell to their hosted offerings and this API helps that. They might lose a few customers to other hosting providers (Wix, Squarespace, etc) but it saves them support costs so they can keep the minimal profits from domain registration and renewal fees.
GoDaddy, if you want to streamline... (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, if GoDaddy was to streamline and simplify a process, they should start at home. Remove all your upselling attempts and "oh look, this is surely some bling you MUST HAVE, you'll be the coolest dude in your school" crap. And, lo and behold, you will probably find out what everyone else already knew: That configuring DNS is actually trivial... provided you don't get it from GoDaddy.
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Remember a zillion years ago when it was all Network Solutions and they were still mostly acting in the mode of the original Internet graybeards? Like it was trivial to update name servers, straightforward interfaces and email verification and it just worked? No upsells, no redirection to shopping/buying pages, no nearly-hidden "manage my domain" buttons?
Obviously the email verification thing wasn't a security dream, but I can remember setting up domains and getting them pointed at my name servers with ac
How has this not come up yet (Score:1)
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Maybe because someone throws it up every. damn. time. anyone mentions the word "standard" anywhere in the conversation, relevant or not?
Some of us WANT friction (Score:3)
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Brings up an interesting point... (Score:2)
OK, I admit I'm pretty old school, so I have a serious question. Things like the DNS standard are pretty old, yet extremely fundamental to how the Internet operates. By fundamental, I mean things in the Session layer or below that most web APIs never see...stuff like TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, etc. I'm not a network wizard (I'm a systems engineer) but I did have to learn enough about these things back in the day to get good at troubleshooting.
In the API driven world, you use a JavaScript or similar library to push a
What problem does this fix? (Score:2)
I looked over the summary and the two articles they linked do, and I'm trying to understand what problem this fixes. In one article, it says:
For example, imagine setting up an e-commerce website using service providers like Squarespace or Wix and then going back to your Internet registrar to make sure that the domain you just registered is set up to properly point to and respond to the website you just finished building. It's a process that's not for the faint of heart.
... but I really don't know what they're referring to. Changing your DNS records is not particularly difficult. I suppose you need to know what an A record is vs. a CNAME record. Their example of DNS being scary points to a page on how to change your MX records for Google Apps, which... I'm sorry, but if you're configuring MX records, you should have some idea of w
We need a decentralized DNS system.. (Score:1)
Not Impressed (Score:1)
If you don't think this is a problem try managing 300+ dedicated tactic URL's that marketing changes every two months. Sure, it's a solvable problem with scripts & bash tools but it wouldn't take them more than a day to give me a CSV download in real