Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

Going to get a little off-topic here, feel free to downvote if you feel it's out of place.

Many HN users presumably saw the public launch of sr.ht a few weeks ago. I've been thinking about directions that it could be expanded in the future, and the use-cases which fit best are both (1) things I need to do to maintain sr.ht anyway, and could make into a service available to users; (2) things which are annoying to do elsewhere. To this end I'm thinking about offering domain registration. Since users pay a monthly/yearly subscription fee for sr.ht, I can just sell domains at wholesale prices and take no margin. Then you get to use the nice UI and API and so on sr.ht offers for doing DNS and domain registration (DNS probably through just pushing zone files to a git repo).

Thoughts?

While I have no doubt that you of all people could do DNS right, it seems a bit like scope creep IMO. I'm very excited about sr.ht, but also worried that it might be too much to execute all at once.

That being said, DNS records in Git sounds kinda neat. You avoid all the special authentication nonsense of "DynamicDNS" or proprietary APIs by using SSH keys, and you have versioning for rolling back configurations. Also you don't need a special UI that essentially builds zone files as you'd just have your users make their own. You might need some validation of the files before you actually put them into BIND though.

Well, in terms of scope, this falls under

>things I need to do to maintain sr.ht anyway

I already run my own authoritative nameservers and if I automated the maintenance and deployment of that, it'd only be an afternoon of hacking to make available to the public, and a weekend of hacking to add domain registration to it. I don't just work on sr.ht, too, so having a streamlined and integrated domain registration and DNS service would be great for my other projects.

Your scope, yeah, but I think the previous poster was talking about product scope.

Though I do think it could be a good idea.

>That being said, DNS records in Git sounds kinda neat

I think luadns.com does this, https://github.com/luadns/dns

I haven't actually used them so not sure how good their product is.

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