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For any­one who wants to han­dle dynamic DNS (either in con­junc­tion with DHCPd or not) with Bind and absolutely hates the ver­bosity of nsup­date, here’s a shell script which han­dles the common-cases of adding and removing:

• Forward/reverse entries
• CNAMEs

The com­mand line argu­ments are –k (privkey) –a (action) –h (host­name) –i (ipaddr) –c (cname) –d (debu­glevel) (-t ttl)

Usage:
    setns -k privkey -a set -h hostname (-i ipaddr|-c cname) [-d #] [-t ttl]
    setns -k privkey -a unset -h hostname (-i ipaddr|-c cname) [-d #]

You need to be famil­iar enough with Bind9/DNS to have cre­ated a key­pair with dnssec-keygen and added it to your named.conf.

Other ways of sim­pli­fy­ing this are a Tcl/Tk GUI tool and a python script. Neither of which have the dis­tinct advan­tage of my tool: giv­ing me an excuse to do useful/interesting things with bash. Downsides are peren­nial script­ing prob­lems with insuf­fi­cient input val­i­da­tion, it’s not trans­ac­tional (i.e. if the sec­ond half fails it won’t back out the first half), and it requires FQDNs rather than using your search domain.

The script, avail­able under the GPL.

Also, good to see all the progress we’re mak­ing in the ille­gal, immoral, unjust, but mag­i­cally winnable war to let Exxon take upwards of 75% prof­its on all the unex­ploited oil reserves in the Baghdad in the Midwest Cornfields.

Glenn Greenwald is dis­cussing the stun­ning hypocrisy of Republicans, as they decry the viciously par­ti­san Democrats for out­ing a gay Republican — osten­si­bly because drag­ging per­sonal sex­ual con­duct into pol­i­tics will drive good peo­ple from governance.

Color me cyn­i­cal, but why is this such a shock? This is the same crowd that spent a large chunk of 1992 decry­ing Clinton’s admis­sion that he was too stu­pid to use a weed bong in 1968 — and then turned right around and claimed that Bush’s arrest for dri­ving under the influ­ence of cocaine in 1979 was OK because he later claimed to have found Jeebus.

I mean, come on. Clinton says he almost smoked weed (“It was Joe’s weed, Dad, and I didn’t even inhale!” fol­lowed by the sheep­ish pseudo-boasts to friends later “…but I wish I had!”), and gets trounced as com­pletely inca­pable of being President. Bush did coke often enough to get arrested for it, but that’s dif­fer­ent, because (like most stun­ning hyp­ocrites and ass­holes) he played the Repentence Card with the Jesus Enhancement (+5).

Meanwhile, the Democrats didn’t really say much about Bush’s coke usage, because they had pre­vi­ously defended Clinton exactly the same way that the Republicans were defend­ing Bush. The Democrats had shame (albeit mis­placed — coke is a hard drug, weed isn’t) and the Republicans had none.

Of course, for that to play a part in the elec­tions, peo­ple have to remem­ber what hap­pened more than a month ago, and let that knowl­edge affect their deci­sions. Which is what the Republicans appear to be count­ing on their fol­low­ers skip­ping this time around as well.