[HCoop-Help] Setting DNS records (for DKIM and other things)

[Stephen Michel]

Hi Aaron. Maybe you already got help off list, but if not:

On Sun, Dec 3 2023 at 05:27:48 PM -0500, almiqui <almiqui at hcoop.net> 
wrote:
> Hi, everyone! I'm using HCoop as the name server for some of my 
> domains. I think that means I have to use DomTool to set DNS records. 
> I finally found the dnsText function in the Easy_domain module, but 
> what do I do with it? If any of you have successfully set up DKIM on 
> an HCoop site using HCoop name servers, I'd love to see your 
> configuration.

Here's a snippet of what I use for SPF, you can look up my website to 
see how it turns out:

dom "smichel.me" where
  CreateWWW = false;
with
  dnsDefaultText "v=spf1 mx ~all";
end

> In the past, I've also needed to set CNAME and A records. In these 
> cases, I'm not even sure which DomTool functions to use. Does 
> dnsAlias create a CNAME record? It would be nice to have at least an 
> attempt at a reference for this.

Yes, dnsAlias is a CNAME to whatever the main domain is. Here's the 
full entry that I use for pointing jabber.smichel.me at a hosted 
snikket server.

domain "jabber.smichel.me"
with
  nameserver "ns1.hcoop.net";
  nameserver "ns2.hcoop.net";
  (* values for snikket servers *)
  dnsDefault "49.13.15.16"; (* A record *)
  dnsDefaultv6 "2a01:4f8:c012:4a65::1"; (* AAAA record *)
  dnsAlias "groups" "jabber.smichel.me"; (* CNAME 
groups.jabber.smichel.me jabber.smichel.me *)
  dnsAlias "share" "jabber.smichel.me"; (* CNAME 
share.jabber.smichel.me jabber.smichel.me *)
end;

I couldn't figoure out how to cname something more than one subdomain 
deep (aka include the config above inside my config for smichel.me). I 
imagine you'd just need to make another `domain` entry like I did here.

> I think I sort of understand the type signatures of some of the DNS 
> record functions, but I have trouble finding explicit examples of how 
> to write a valid type value into my DomTool code. The only way I've 
> found to do it is to sift through the DomTool examples page until I 
> happen to stumble upon a usage example of a function that takes the 
> same type.

There's two other ways I use.

The easiest thing is to look through other people's domtool configs; 
they're generally public. For example, I found out how to do the cname 
recently by snooping on jackhill's dotfiles, since I know he's also a 
JMP.chat customer and was likely using the hosted snikket instance 
through them. You could find the files that my snippets come from at 
/afs/hcoop.net/user/s/sm/smichel17/.public/.domtool/

The other thing is grabbing the source (from 
https://git.hcoop.net/hcoop/domtool2.git) and searching through the 
`lib` folder. I don't know the source well enough to decipher much from 
this, but it can give you an idea of what directives are available. 
easy_domain.dtl is probably the most useful one 
https://git.hcoop.net/hcoop/domtool2.git/blob/HEAD:/lib/easy_domain.dtl


Also, keep us in the loop about what you figure out about DKIM! I'd 
like to set it up for myself (and imagine others would, too), but, 
time…

Cheers,
Stephen

-- 
To respect your time, I try to write short, functional emails.