Python API: UltraDNS

I needed to update a CNAME in our UltraDNS account last week and the WebUI was simply too much to bear given the amount of objects we have in a single domain.  Obviously it was not in alphabetical (or any) order. Nor does the search appear to work. So I finally decided to look into the XML-RPC API to see if there was a less painful way to handle it.

Like most people, I like to see what is available "out there" before I build something from scratch. I found Josh Rendek's pyUltraDNS, but it appears that it was built just to create A records. There is a method named 'generic_call' in the UDNS class, but it appears to be limited only to the CreateAName methodName (or any methodName that uses the exact same parameters). Additional methodNames could be incorporated if you duplicate the call and retrieve methods but, since creating one-offs of each methodName goes against my philosophies of automation and scale, I decided to keep looking. Though it is rather irksome that the uber-chic pyUltraDNS name is associated with a python module that does not cover ALL the UltraDNS methods, the script did teach me a little bit about retrieving data from an OpenSSL socket, so it was worth investigating.

I decided to follow the same logic as my ongoing AWS script, which was to make it interactive --- if the /user does not pass parameters to the class methods, then the script would prompt you each step of the way. Halfway through writing my interactive script, I also discovered Tim Bunce's UltraDNS perl module at CPAN, which does a really cool job on extracting the Methods from the PDF documentation. So, using pyPDF to avoid the need for the user to deal with the "save/export as plain text" step, I added something similar. In addition, I also have the script download the PDF file from UltraDNS if it is not found in the same directory as the script.

All the methodNames configurations are based off of the NUS_API_XML.pdf documentation since I do not have the need, nor the resources to test every single methodName. Since I was mostly dealing with the Create and Update CNAME methods, I added 2 "parsers" that will strip out the useful information from the XML responses (I am normally not a fan of XML, but UltraDNS responses make me less of a fan). If you add any parsers or want me to add additional parsers, please send me a copy of the XML response and I will try to incorporate it in. The same goes for any bugs, since the XML response will assist in helping me rework the script without having to reproduce the problem. Hope you find the script useful, download it from my github repository:

     UltraDNS_API.py

P.S. I have also NOT tested it on all versions of python, only 2.6, which is what I tried to constrain my MacPorts installations to for the sake of consistency.  Feel free to comment if any of the methodNames do not work correctly.