Rimu Hosting DNS API

Here's the shell script that I'm using on my linux boxes to keep the DNS hosted by Rimu Hosting up to date with any changes to my dynamically allocated IP address from BT.


#!/bin/bash
wget -q -O -  -i rimu-dns-urls.txt  > /dev/null


The idea is to have a text file of URLs each of which updates the DNS for one address.  The list currently looks like this:

https://rimuhosting.com/dns/dyndns.jsp?host=lego.goopot.co.uk&api_key=MY-SECRET-NUMBER&ttl=300
https://rimuhosting.com/dns/dyndns.jsp?host=lego-wiki.goopot.co.uk&api_key=MY-SECRET-NUMBER&ttl=300


I then set up a one-line crontab entry to run this every five minutes:

*/5 * * * * cd ~dave/code/dynadns; ./dns-rimu.sh


DNS Trouble

I was alerted by the nice people at SiteUptime that my website had stopped working at about 7:30am this morning. I had planned to go jogging with my dad and had friends coming over for lunch. I just had time to get on to putty to see if I could see what was going on. Lighttpd wouldn't start -- complaining that it couldn't resolve the domain name. A few ping attempts later it was clear that nothing would resolve. I didn't have time to figure out what had happened, but the support at RimuHosting is really superb. I sent them a support ticket and within 30 minutes their techie had updated my /etc/resolve.conf with their newest DNS cache servers and everything was working again. I can't recommend RimuHosting highly enough! They have a nice script to fix the resolv.conf in case you were wondering :-)