ipq.co is a new service I put together to lower the barrier for dns management. It’s the tinyurl of the dns world – provide an IP address and you get a random dns record for it (or you can choose your own, if it’s available). Looking at other dns management systems, I was surprised this hadn’t been done before (and by how awful most of the dns interfaces are out there!)
I wrote it in Ruby using the Rails 3 framework, with the dns records being served by the PowerDNS MySQL back end (though I’ll likely be switching it to use a custom back end using my powerdns_pipe library for more flexibility).
We’re building a big new cloud system over at Brightbox and we’ve been thinking how to provide convenient dns records for our customers. We already have some basic integration but the resulting records are quite a mouthful. ipq.co is just a bit of an experiment to explore other ways of solving the problem. There has already been some discussion over on Hacker News about possible applications (and implications) of the service – I’m interesting in how people will use it.
I’ve got some plans for other features which I’ll be adding over the next few weeks, and then I’ll be selling it to Google for low 7 figures, so watch this space.
Wildcard IP lookups
You can now do wildcard IP lookups, as provided by the xip.io service, useful for development environments:
$ host whatever.10.0.0.5.ip.ipq.co whatever.10.0.0.5.ip.ipq.co is an alias for 2rvxtx.ip.ipq.co. 2rvxtx.ip.ipq.co has address 10.0.0.5
New additional domain name
A donor has transferred ownership of a new domain for use with ipq.co. So now, rather childishly, you can create instant dns records as subdomains of mypen.is:
$ host localhost.mypen.is localhost.mypen.is has address 127.0.0.1