Setting up a VM for local DNS (part 2)

Following on from the first part of the post – the exciting and enthralling conclusion….

Setting up a VM for local DNS (part 1)

Recently at work, I was setting up a new virtual machine for development. I was working on something which required several domains pointing to the same box (to test with cookie management). I needed multiple subdomains configured - servicea.devbox, serviceb.devbox for example.

Now what I wanted was to be able to set a wildcard DNS entry, but there was no guarantee I would be on a network that could support that. I would be setting up these VMs on my work laptop – and my laptop would be used on a variety of different networks.

Most of the VMs would be using Virtualbox‘s bridged adapter to connect to the Internet, so I couldn’t rely necessarily on the IPs being fixed on an internal network; The network addresses for my VMs would be at the mercy of whatever DHCP server that was handing out IPs at the time.

The majority of interaction that I would have with these servers would be through a web browser directly on my Windows 7 laptop.

My original goal would have been to just define a hosts file using wildcards, and modify that when the IPs of my VMs changed. But since you can’t use wildcards in a hosts file, that wasn’t an option. An alternative approach would have been to just define every single host that I might need in the hosts file (i.e. no wildcards for you, mister!), but that seemed untidy, especially when I might require several different domains for the same VM (for doing tests with sessions) and have several subdomains (one for each service on the machine) all pointing to the same box.

So I tried an approach which appealed to me a lot more – a local VM for serving DNS.

Why WordPress?

Prior to doing to a particular piece of development for work, I decided that I would inform all of the other developers about what I wanted to do.

Before doing that, I decided that I would actually post about it in a blog, because I had been mulling over these thoughts for a while, and fancied posting them somewhere public.

Before doing that – I decided I had to actually acquire a blog. Makes sense, I guess.

So why did I choose WordPress? Mainly because I wasn’t too sure what I wanted to go for – LiveJournal was old school and Blogger wanted to use my Google account, and I don’t subscribe to the whole “everything under one account” notion yet. So WordPress it is. Unless someone wants to point me to something better…

So it begins…

It’s been many a year since I’ve actually blogged about things – unless Twitter / Facebook status updates count. Which they don’t.

Turns out that I’ve got something that I fancy actually ranting about, and since so many of my co-workers appear to have blogs for such things, I guess I’d better catch up…