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Vanity Nameservers with AWS Route53

I have written about creating vanity nameservers before. When I started working at Amazon this year, I moved most of my personal infrastructure to the AWS cloud.

Amazon, like Rackspace, offers a DNS service; it’s called Route53. When you create a new hosted zone in Route53, it assigns a set of four default nameservers. The nameservers are each in different top-level domains (TLDs): .com, .net, .org, and .co.uk. There’s a good reason for this; whenever a client goes to resolve a specific domain name, it has to start at the TLD; for example, if you’re trying to resolve example.org, then you’d need to start at the .org TLD, then issue a query for example.org. By using a nameserver with the same TLD as the domain, it eliminates one DNS query across the Internet.

However, nameservers like ns-1576.awsdns-05.co.uk do not help your brand; moreover, Bad Guys looking at them can see that you’re hosted by Amazon, and thus it gives them a potentially narrower scope for attacking your site.

In addition, if you’re registering dozens of domain names (like I am), having to set up and manage different name servers for each domain can drive you mad.

Luckily, Route53 provides a way around this, called reusable delegation sets. (Delegation set is Amazon’s term for a group of nameservers.)

Creating a reusable delegation set

There’s no way to create and manage reusable delegation sets in the AWS console, so you’ll have to use the AWS command-line interface (CLI).

To start off, you’ll create a reusable delegation set:

$ aws route53 create-reusable-delegation-set --caller-reference XYZ.01

(The --caller-reference is an arbitrary string that you can use to refer back to this transaction in the future.)

When you create the reusable delegation set, it will respond with a JSON object with information about it:

{
"Location":
 "https://route53.amazonaws.com/2013-04-01/delegationset/N3UD5XKBF3YXYM", 
    "DelegationSet": {
        "NameServers": [
            "ns-167.awsdns-20.com", 
            "ns-1576.awsdns-05.co.uk", 
            "ns-961.awsdns-56.net", 
            "ns-1342.awsdns-39.org"
        ], 
        "CallerReference": "XYZ.01", 
        "Id": "/delegationset/N3UD5XKBF3YXYM"
    }
}

There are two things to note about this (you should probably save it to a file for later reference, by the way). First, the Id is /delegationset/N3UD5XKBF3YXYM; you’ll need this to refer to the delegation set in the future.

Creating vanity nameserver records

Second, you’ll see that there are four NameServers defined; these will become your vanity nameservers. Convert each of these to their IP addresses:

$ dig ns-1576.awsdns-05.co.uk
...
ns-1576.awsdns-05.co.uk. 70673	IN	A	205.251.198.40
...

In this case, ns-1576.awsdns-05.co.uk becomes 205.251.198.40.

Once you have these IP addresses, you can define hosts (A records) in your vanity domain to make to them:

NS1.MYVANITYDOMAIN.XYZ 3600 IN A 205.251.198.40

Now that you’ve defined those hosts, you can use them in your SOA (start of authority records) and as the default nameservers for your domains.

(I’m not going to go into all that detail here.)

Using a reusable delegation set

To host a new domain with those nameservers on Route53, you’ll need to specify the delegation set ID:

aws route53 create-hosted-zone --caller-reference XYZ.02 \
    --name MYNEWVANITYURL.COM \
    --delegation-set-id /delegationset/N3UD5XKBF3YXYM

This will create a default SOA record pointing to the original Amazon-provided names; however, since you’ve created your own synonym hostnames, you can just edit the domain to use yours.

Having done that, you can now update your domain at your registrar to point to your new nameservers. Verify this with the whois command:

$ whois broadpool.com
...
Name Server: NS1.BROADPOOL.COM
Name Server: NS2.BROADPOOL.COM
Name Server: NS3.BROADPOOL.COM
Name Server: NS4.BROADPOOL.COM
....

Now most of my domains use these four nameservers.

One word of warning: It is possible (though unlikely) that the IP address for a nameserver might change in the future. If it does, you’ll need to change your corresponding A record for the vanity host. It’s unlikely that all four of them would change at once, so there’s very little risk with this.

Glen Campbell
Lynnwood, WA (USA)
December 22, 2015