Automation

Happy New Year!

Recently, I learned about a thing called ‘Catalog Zones’. A relatively new thing in DNS that helps simplify your DNS architecture. A Catalog Zones contains one or more ‘real’ zones. And it can be useful for configuring slave / secondary DNS servers.

(I would rather not get into the naming thing; I just want people to understand what I am writing.)

Before catalog zones, you had to provision each new zone to your slave DNS servers. Updates are no problem, most of the time. Just issue a NOTIFY and your slaves will AXFR the zone from the master. But configuring new zones onto slaves used to be a pain (unless you were using the superslave feature).

(or almost any other app)

In a recent tweet I showed the output of a script that I run every week to automatically activate offers that the Dutch supermarket Albert Hein puts in their app every week. You are supposed to open up to app, go to ‘bonus box’ and activate the offers you want. Normally, you can activate 5 / 10 discounts. But the thing is, if you have ‘Albert Heijn Premium’ (12,99 / year) you can activate 10 discounts. Sometimes there are more then 10, but we’ll ignore that for now.

Here’s what I did about it.

Working at a VoIP provider comes with some great advantages. One of these is Mobile on PBX. This basically means I can route the calls from and to my mobile phone through my own PBX of choice. This works with a host at the provider we call a ‘mobreg’. This is the host that pretends to be a phone, and registers on my PBX.