IPv6 with Zen internet and Ubiquiti

Having recently moved over to a Ubiquiti UDM for my home router I wanted to get my IPv6 connection back and working. Searching for advice on how to do this there were quite a few articles describing the trials and tribulations involved in getting things working. It turns out that with the latest firmware release getting IPv6 working is really very easy. Unfortunately nothing in the management UI actually lets you know it’s working. So even if you have it configured correctly you’ll only be able to tell by checking if you can reach things via IPv6. So to help anyone else who was in my position here are the really very simple instructions for configuring IPv6 on a UDM running firmware 1.8.3 with Zen Internet. Continue reading

DNS discovery

Sadly even in this day and age of data portability many DNS providers don’t like to let you export your own DNS data. Having finally received one too many PDF exports of a zone file I thought there must be an easier way to make my life simpler. Whilst I’m aware of some DNS providers that will make a stab at pre-populating your domain for you when you transfer domains, there doesn’t seem to be a general tool for achieving this task. The closest thing I could find was DNSdumpster which misses some of the obvious things and isn’t in the friendliest of formats. At this point there was only one thing to do. Write a quick and dirty tool for finding the well known RR’s for any given domain and present them in a BIND friendly format. From far too many years of transferring domains from a variety of… Continue reading

DNS trouble shooting for beginners

Introduction DNS generally just works (at least as far as you’re concerned), which is good as the internet would be far less fun without it. However this does mean that many people don’t really know how to tell if a problem is a DNS error or something else – this makes life difficult for support desks and even worse causes work for DNS admins. It needn’t be so! Telling if something is a DNS issue is actually quite simple, and trouble shooting it isn’t much more difficult. To start with there are really only a very few ways that DNS can go wrong ( from a user perspective – from an admin perspective DNS can go wrong in many and varied ways ). Not responding at all Returning the wrong data Not returning a record when it should That from an end users point of view are really the only… Continue reading

Shell access via PDNS LUA

I’ve been spending a bit of time playing with the LUA functionality of Power DNS, it was inevitable that I got round to implementing a generic shell over DNS. It’s not very polished it doesn’t like interactive commands or commands with odd characters and it is more insecure than a very insecure thing that isn’t very safe. It is however a surprisingly short amount of code for what it does. There are a very few circumstances I can think of where a very restricted version of this might be useful, but really there’s always going to be a better and more sensible option. However it’s an interesting proof of concept and more importantly it was fun. If you don’t understand this code do not use it , if you do understand this code you know why you don’t want to use it. The code as shown below won’t actually work… Continue reading