2018-11-20 - News - Tony Finch
There is a new web site for DNS in Cambridge at https://www.dns.cam.ac.uk/
The new site is mostly the old (sometimes very old) documentation that was hosted under https://jackdaw.cam.ac.uk/ipreg/. It has been reorganized and reformatted to make it easier to navigate; for example some pages have been rescued from the obscurity of the news archives. There are a few new pages that fill in some of the gaps.
The old pages (apart from the IP Register database interface) will shortly be replaced by redirects to their new homes on the new site.
News feeds
Our DNS news mailing list has been renamed to uis-dns-announce;
those who were subscribed to the old cs-nameservers-announce list
have been added to the new list. This mailing list is for items of
interest to those running DNS servers on the CUDN, but which aren't of
broad enough relevance to bother the whole of ucam-itsupport.
There are now Atom feeds for DNS news available from https://www.dns.cam.ac.uk/news/.
This news item is also posted at https://www.dns.cam.ac.uk/news/2018-11-20-web-site.html
Infrastructure
The new site is part of the project to move the IP Register database off Jackdaw. The plan is:
New web server; evict documentation. (done)
Replcate IP Register web user interface on new server. (This work will mostly be about porting Jackdaw's bespoke "WebDBI"
mod_perl/ Oracle application framework.)Move the IP Register database off Jackdaw onto a new PostgreSQL database, without altering the external appearance. (This will involve porting the schema and stored procedures, and writing a test suite.)
After that point we should have more tractable infrastructure, making it easier to provide better user interface and APIs.
The new site is written in Markdown. The Project Light templates
use Mustache, because it is programming-language-agnostic, so it
will work with the existing mod_perl scripts, and with TypeScript in
the future.