Software

I've been a long-time user of Parallels Plesk Panel. It really is the best product for maintaining a hosting-server. However, it is lacking the support for domain owners to update their dynamically changing IP-addresses into the panel's DNS-zone automatically.

Since I really needed such a service, I built one from parts. The central piece is DHIS client/server -software. I don't know why they stopped distributing the server-component source code, but I still have it. The license in the software is very liberal, so it can be used by anybody for anything.

As default, DHIS only supports DNS TSIG updates. That is not a good idea in Plesk, since master database for DNS-records is in the MySQL database. Also, getting BIND to refresh a zone really requires a root-access. Nobody wants to run their daemons as root, so I did two things: I added possibility of doing updates with an external script and wrote such a Perl-script to interface with Plesk's RPC API to update DNS-records.

My work is distributed here: http://opensource.hqcodeshop.com/dhis/

As the next step, I'll be investigating how to get any support for this into Plesk's GUI. It really would be nice to allow client to generate his own QRC-authentication keys instead of me doing it manually.