Migating DNS From Rackspace to Google
Posted17 October 2017
One of my clients is moving out of Rackspace and into Google (for a variety of reasons, not least cost and service). Part of this work requires moving some hosted DNS domains.
I asked Rackspace to export the domains, and they pointed me at a service called Pitchfork, which is essentially a tool to show you the requests and responses you get when talking to the Rackspace Cloud API. It's actually a pretty neat service (you'll need a Rackspace Cloud username and API key to log on to it).
It seemed pretty straight forward, and I was limbering up to write some scripts to export and import data. It turns out that others are way ahead of me. I used the excellent clouddns to pull the data from Rackspace (and save it out in BIND format).
Importing into Google was also pretty easy. They've got it all documented in their usual, slightly hard to understand way. It turns out you can't import SOA or NS records, and if it finds them, it fails. Some Bash scripting removed them from my export files in short order. From them on, I was able to create the domains and import the data into them in a matter of minutes using a couple of 'gcloud' commands (and a bit of bash to convert 'domain.com' into 'domain-com' for the Google name fields which don't like dots).
There's a lot of criticism of 'the cloud' because your data isn't safe there. However, on this point, it's proven to be surprisingly straight forward.
Tags: #dns #google #rackspace
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