Home > Archive >  2009 >  September >  16

I need a Domain Name Server with a REST interface

Wednesday, September 16, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Here's what I need: 

1. A server I can use to manage hosts for a domain that I own that am currently not using. I have many. I will pick one. 

2. Ideally I don't even want to run the server myself. Someone from the community of people who read this blog who are interested in distributed realtime message systems and want to play a role in their development. This project will not use a lot of bandwidth or server resources. It's primarily for development. The other users will be geeks like you and me. 

3. The server must have a REST interface. I need at least one call. It takes three parameters (that I can think of, there may need to be more). The three parameters are: name of sub-domain (something like george), record name (I'll explain below) and the value. The same call can be used to change the value. Probably should send a string that's a MD5 hash of all the parameters plus my password. Something like that. You can tell me what it should be, but nothing too fancy. 

The record name is a DNS record name. Not A or MX maybe TXT. The value is the address of their cloud-enabled feed. So george.loose.ly would be the name of George Metesky's realtime feed. If you want to follow him, you wouldn't have to use his feed address you'd use george.loose.ly. The client would just do a DNS lookup to find his feed.  

4. If no one is willing to operate the server, I'll operate it. It must be something that runs on EC2.  

5. I need it soon. I want to start developing a prototype. Tomorrow? Friday? Please, no later than Monday. It seems like a fairly easy thing to do.  

Anyway that's the idea. Comments welcome of course. And DNS gurus if I've made some egregious errors, please let me know, gently.