Month: February 2003

I’ve recently got my own Nominet “tag” so that I can register my very own .uk domain names with the registry body. Ok, my employer has their own Nominet tag as well – but since they are now a member of Nominet they can register domain names at a cost of around £5 instead of £80 I’ve got to fork out if I want to register one (yep, you get a £75 discount PER DOMAIN if you are a member of Nominet – tag holders get no discount).

Anyway, I’ve got to put in place a mechanism so that the registration of domain names via Nominet is quick, simple and automated. Sounds easy – after all, Nominet do have a nice Automaton that you can interface with via email. Ok – it’s not perfect (as it isvia email instead of one of the many many other protocols such as SOAP with XML that could be used for ‘instantaneous’ results) but at least it’s automated…

Alas – there’s a catch. To confirm the authenticity of each request, every email to the Nominet Automaton has to be PGP signed. And can I get a nice automated PGP signing system running? Nope. There’s nothing on the internet I can find to do the entire DNS management system for us (you’d think that of all the hundreds of companies that use Nominet at least one of them would have released some sort of code!) – nor can I get our servers to play nicely. I just want to use either Perl or PHP (I’m not fussy which!) to generate a nice templated email that has the appropriate PGP signature (either generated using Perl or PHP modules or even forking off and using GPG to sign it) and emailing it off to Nominet. Not too hard is it? Why am I having so much trouble though? PHP manages to save the pre-signed file to the temp storage area alright, but then GnuPG (GPG) refuses to either encrypt it or store the output – but it works all right from the command line. Perl – practically like wise. I’ve tried using Benjamin Trott’s OpenPGP module (yep, Ben Trott of MovableType fame) – it’s installed nicely on the server and I can run it as root. Go back to “standard user permissions” and Perl (and the Linux filing system) denies all knowledge that the module even exists!

Does ANY ONE have either a Nominet aware (or other registry – I can adapt it) domain name registration system that I/we can use that’s capable of sending the appropriate emails to Nominet? Or has someone got a bit more experience with using PGP/GPG (GPG being the Gnu PGP variant without certain patent-involving code) on a RedHat Linux (ideally in a “shared server” environment) system that can offer some advice?

I’m going to try and see if I can reverse-engineer Ben’s Stamp application at some point over the next few days to see if I can get any ideas – but third party contributions are more than welcome! I would have thought Nominet themselves would have at least provided a “basic toolkit” to their members – but alas, nope 🙁 And s–ds law dictates just as I finish writing a system from scratch, Nominet will implement the domain registration system using SSL HTTP SOAP…