On Thursday the 22nd of March, Jimmy Bergman, our Lead Developer and System Architect, will enter the main stage at WHD.global to talk about our experiences from a large scale DNSSEC deployment.

Don’t miss this opportunity to listen to one of the most respected Domain & DNS specialist from Sweden and learn more about DNSSEC automation/deployment.

Atomia will also have a team of hosting automation experts in place to talk about Atomia Hosting Automation Platform. If you want to know more about our products or discuss hosting automation in general, don’t hesitate to contact us in advance and book a meeting.

• WHD agenda: http://www.worldhostingdays.com/eng/agenda-120322.php

How to spot the Atomia crew among thousands of visitors? Just look for the pink shirts!

The Web App is in an early development phase, still, it gets the job done! Check out the screen shots of the current functionality:

Visit atomiadns.com for more information on the product, how to get it and how to contribute! Source code is available on GitHub.

Atomia releases free DNS management software with fully automated DNSSEC support

VÄSTERÅS, Sweden, February 20, 2012 – Atomia AB, the company behind Atomia Cloud Hosting Platform, has announced today that Atomia DNS has been released under the ISC open source license.

“This is a very exciting day for us; we have always admired successful open source projects. Over the years, we have contributed with code and knowledge to several projects of the kind and today we feel that we have the opportunity to spread the buzz of our great products and give something exciting back to the open source community.” said Daniel Jarpinger, executive vice president of Atomia.

Atomia DNS is a powerful tool for managing DNS zones; it eliminates the need for manual work and has fully automated DNSSEC support out of the box. It is easy to use for administrators and programmatically. Atomia DNS comes with a powerful and simple to use API that makes it easy to integrate with any system. The DNS management software is today used by several large Internet Service Providers.

“Atomia DNS gives you full control over your name servers; it also comes with DNSSEC support out of the box. With modest resources you will be able to sign and manage a significant number of zones – and it scales easily. Atomia DNS was earlier exclusive to the clients of Atomia Cloud Hosting Platform and is proven to work in big production environments. It’s capabilities to handle DNSSEC were battle-tested in late December last year – with excellent results.” said Jimmy Bergman, Chief Architect at Atomia.

Atomia DNS is released under the ISC license which is easy to understand and without unnecessary restrictions.

“The mantra for this project was No string attached. We wanted a model where everyone could download and start using the product. We also wanted it to be easy to contribute to the project and to build your own custom implementations. No matter if you host your own DNS server in the garage or if you work for an international Internet Service Provider you can use Atomia DNS. We understand that support might be critical to some users and thanks to the existing support organization at Atomia, we will be able to provide premium support to those who want it” said Daniel Jarpinger.

More information about the project can be found at the project website www.atomiadns.com, and the source code is available at GitHub.

About Atomia

Atomia AB was founded in Sweden in 2009. The company’s sole focus is to enable end-users to consume complex infrastructural services. With more than 10 years of experience in the hosting business, the team at Atomia have built a rock-solid, high-performing hosting automation platform with both hosters and developers in mind.

Atomia DNS is a DNS management software with DNSSEC support out of the box. It comes packed with a simple to use, yet, powerful API and can easily be integrated with any system. For the occasion we have built a simple web application (in node.js) for those who prefer a GUI to manage their zones. Of course, we provide a command line client as well.

Atomia DNS was earlier exclusive to Atomia Cloud Hosting Platform and has gained publicity thanks to its robustness and effectiveness during the roll-out of DNSSEC for the Swedish TLD (.se).

• Check out the project website at: http://atomiadns.com
• Atomia DNS on GitHub

Is excellent support essential to your organization?
No worries, Atomia offers 3 levels of premium support for Atomia DNS; allowing everyone, from private persons to international ISP providers, to benefit from this great product!

In this video we will walk you through some of the cool features of Atomia Hosting Control Panel. We will show you the Website Hub, Atomia Domain Manager and Atomia VPS Manager.

(Don’t forget to turn HD on!)

The output of the client is in JSON format and to be able to easily filter relevant data from the output the examples in this article uses Jgrep which is a great tool for this purpose.

Provision a new website

We will start with a simple example of how to add a new website to an existing Atomia installation, the website will be added on our Linux cluster with the hostname “testingatomia.com” and our account has id 123456.

Find the logical id of the CsBase service

Websites are added as a child service to CsBase, so in order to add our new website we need to find the logical identifier of the parent service. This can be done by executing the following command:

>> atomia service list --account 123456 |jgrep "name=CsBase" -s logical_id
>> a0281d3a-5f57-44a2-9d0d-e83f864c757a

All logical identifiers is GUID format.

Add a web site service

Now that we know the physical id of the base service we are ready to add a web site service. We will specify the parent service with the –parent flag and the basic information for our website within –servicedata. Note that input is expected to be in JSON format.

>> atomia service add --account 123456 --parent "a0281d3a-5f57-44a2-9d0d-e83f864c757a" --servicedata '{ "name" : "CsLinuxWebsite", "properties" : {"Hostname" : "testingatomia.com", "DomainPrefix" : "null", "DnsZone" : "testingatomia.com", "InfoEmailPassword" : "abcd1234"}}'

When the command is done you will get a JSON representation of the service you just added, Atomia will provision the website for you including email support (info@testingatomia.com will be created automatically with the password specified above).

The website we just added visible in the Hosting Control Panel

It really is that simple. The next example is a little more complex.

Provision a VPS in the cloud

In this example we will provision a new VPS from the command line. We will use the same account as above (123456).

Find the logical id of the CsCloud service

In the same way as websites VPS:s are added under a parent service (CsCloud). To find out the logical id we can use a similar command as in the previous example.

>> atomia service list --account 123456 |jgrep "name=CsCloud" -s logical_id
>> c82e0e29-41b2-4dd6-9af1-409bff13a545

Add a new key pair

In order to log in to our new VPS we need a key that Atomia will generate for us. We first get the identifier of the parent service (CsKeyPairs) and then create a new key par with this parent.

>> atomiaservice list --account 123456 --path  '[{ "CsCloud" : "c82e0e29-41b2-4dd6-9af1-409bff13a545" }]'|jgrep  "name=CsKeyPairs" -s logical_id
>> 2c2b3fd6-6da0-4d68-9ae8-f2b9475cb6c9
>> atomia service add --account 123456 --parent "2c2b3fd6-6da0-4d68-9ae8-f2b9475cb6c9" --servicedata '{"name" : "CsKeyPair", "properties" : {"Name" : "MyKeyPair"}}'

Provision the VPS

VPS services are provisioned under the parent service called CsInstances so we first need to find it’s logical id

>> atomia service list --account 123456 --path  '[{ "CsCloud" : "c82e0e29-41b2-4dd6-9af1-409bff13a545" }]'|jgrep  "name=CsInstances" -s logical_id
>> 66e9bc30-7210-4795-b1f6-f54e0a73ff84

Now we use this logical id to create the VPS.

>> atomia service add --account 123456 --parent "66e9bc30-7210-4795-b1f6-f54e0a73ff84" --servicedata '{"name" : "CsLinuxInstance", "properties" : {"Name" : "MyTestVPS", "Tags" : "Linux", "InstanceType" : "m1.tiny", "KeyPair" : "MyKeyPair", "ImageId" : "ami-00000002", "SecurityGroup" : "null"}}'

Most properties should be pretty self-explanatory, the SecurityGroup parameter can be used to set custom firewall rules, for this example we use the default rules that will add rules that opens the standard ports for a web server.

Now lets connect to our new server. To do this we need to fetch the key that we created for this VPS. This key can be downloaded from the control panel but I guess you are here for the command line so here is a one liner that fetches the key to your local computer and saves it as “mykey.pem”.

>> atomia.py service find --account 123456 --parent "c82e0e29-41b2-4dd6-9af1-409bff13a545" --query '{"name" : "CsKeyPair", "path" : "CsKeyPairs", "properties" : {"name" : "MyKeyPair"}}'|jgrep -s logical_id|xargs -J% atomia service find --account 123456 --parent % --query '{"name" : "EC2KeyPair"}'|jgrep --start properties name=Material -s prop_string_value >> mykey.pem && chmod 400 mykey.pem

Now that we have our key we need to know what hostname to connect to. Our environment is configured to provision services under the domain cloud.atomia.com, we can get the full hostname with the following query.

>> atomia service find --account 123456 --path '[{"CsInstances": "66e9bc30-7210-4795-b1f6-f54e0a73ff84"}, {"CsLinuxInstance" : {"Name": "MyTestVPS"} }]' --query '{"name" : "DnsZoneRecord", "path" : "DnsZone"}'|jgrep --start properties name=Label -s prop_string_value|awk  '{print $1".cloud.atomia.com"}'
>> i-000006f8.cloud.atomia.com

Connect!

>> ssh -i mykey.pem root@i-000006f8.cloud.atomia.se

Summary

In these examples we show how to list and create services, however it is of course also possible to delete and modify all services, accounts and packages. The Command Line Tool can be a valuable asset in any Atomia administrators toolbox so check it out.

Full press release:

• CloudLinux Announces Support for Atomia, Improves Stability of Shared Hosting Servers

• http://blogg.binero.se/ (Swedish)
• http://royal.pingdom.com/ (English)

Hit the links if you want to know more about DNSSEC and why it is needed.

Before the holidays we wrote a blog post on how Atomia DNS has helped to sign a significant number of zones. During the holidays our friends over at Binero went full throttle on signing zones and the result is shown in the official graph from .SE above. Last week Atomia DNS automated the signing of more than 100.000 zones.

Atomia Cloud Hosting Platform is a modern, scalable solution for DNS/Domain, Shared and VPS hosting and comes bundled with Atomia DNS and Atomia Domain Registration, giving you out-of-the-box support for DNSSEC. Our products allow you to compete with market leaders and rapidly deploy new services for you customers.

Our Swedish clients have now started to sign zones using the Atomia DNS software and as shown in the graph above it has had quite some impact on the DNSSEC statistics for the Swedish ccTLD.

As stated in our blog post ‘DNSSEC is coming – Are you ready?‘, .SE is one of the leading ccTLDs rolling out DNSSEC. A result of this is that the ISPs in Sweden have DNSSEC capable resolvers and that the signed zoned will be secured for real and not just in theory.

Atomia DNS automates the DNSSEC key management and integrates with PowerDNS to enable online signing of zones. Atomia has contributed changes to PowerDNS to help enable large-scale implementation on DNSSEC. In the process we have also helped track down a critical bug in the popular Unbound DNS resolver.

With Atomia DNS you are ready to do large scale DNS hosting and sign massive amounts of zones out of the box, and with less resource-consumption than competing solutions. Atomia DNS comes with Atomia Cloud Hosting Platform but can also be installed separately.

Links:

• http://www.powerdns.com/
• http://www.unbound.net/