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I'm building some new DNS servers which will run tinydns. I need to run two instances of tinydns on each server, each serving what is our production authoritative DNS and a legacy authoritative DNS which is being phased out, i.e.:

ns0.production.foo.net
ns0.legacy.bar.net

I want to clearly identify these by their names and create their services by running:

tinydns-conf tinydns tinydnslogs /etc/tinydns/ns0.production.foo.net 172.16.3.100

and:

tinydns-conf tinydns tinydnslogs /etc/tinydns/ns0.legacy.bar.net 172.16.3.101

(and then obviously sym-linking to these folders in /services for the daemontools magic)

The documentation for tinydns-conf states that:

Interface

 tinydns-conf acct logacct D ip

tinydns-conf creates a service directory D that runs tinydns. The name D must start with a slash and must not contain any special characters.

Are periods considered "special characters" in tinydns/daemontools service names?

I've tested tinydns with service names containing periods and nothing appears to be untoward, will I be ok?

I'm running CentOS 6.7 64 bit.

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Kev
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1 Answers1

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I posted more or less the same question to the tinydns mailing list:

http://marc.info/?t=144662485500001&r=1&w=2

The consensus is that periods are probably fine, but be careful of:

Using spaces:

from the source of tiny*.c files, I can’t see a certain restriction.

However, I would not not directory names with white spaces here (source)

Shell meta-characters:

I think you ought to be safe if you interpret "special characters" as shell meta characters. (source)

Other thoughts:

In the respective case the dot ‚.‘ in the file name might be interpreted as RegEx (one wildcard character) on the shell. Since the ‚dot‘ itself is recursively included I would not expect any harm. However, either correct quoting of the file name or escaping the ‚dot‘ is always a good idea.

Thus DJB’s statement is a warning, not a restriction. (source)

Kev
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