need some direction for proper use of Nomulus

[Patrício dos Santos]

Hi there

My company in Angola would like to start a business a register. We have local domains (x.ao) that we would like to use to sell subdomains. 

Doing some research we found Nomulus. And for what we have seen so far looks like it's exactly what we were looking for.

So, today we decided to give it a try. 

We setup 3 virtual servers with Ubuntu 20.04. On 2 servers we installed Bind 9 and we setup as Authoritative DNS Server (one primary server - ns1.xxxxx.ao and other secondary - ns2.xxxxxx.ao). On the third server we try to install Nomulus.  

And the problems begin: 

-  The first problem is that the available documentation is not updated. Digging a little we found out we now need to use Gradle to build the project.

- During the process of building the project... we find out that some others requirements not mentioned on Github docs are needed. For example: Docker and NodeJS. We also run out of disk space, since we were using a Virtual Server with 15GB of Disk.

- After solving those issues, we finally got the "good news".

BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 11m 37s

92 actionable tasks: 63 executed, 29 up-to-date

- At this stage, we were expecting to be able to run Nomulus on this Virtual server, connect it to the DNS server we configured earlier, and be able to access it through our local network just for proof of concept.

But looks like this is not possible, or we didn't find any information describing how this can be done. 

All resources, all github issues we saw, are all pointing to the direction of using Google Cloud Infra to have Nomulus running. Is that true?

Since we have our own datatacenter, is it possible to run Nomulus on our own servers?

Regards

PS

[Lai Jiang]

Hi,

Thanks for your interests in Nomulus. As you probably saw in this mailing list we are aware that our documentation is stale and we are discussing internally to spend some time on fixing it. Please bear with us for the moment.

Currently Nomulus is designed to run on Google App Engine. While you probably can hack it to run on a Java Servlet implementation like Tomcat or Jetty, it  won't be fully functional as it has dependencies on other Google Cloud Platform features such as Data Store. For DNS we do support RFC 2136 compliant implementations, one of which I believe is BIND 9.

We are working on migrating Nomulus to run on Kubernetes and to use PostgreSQL as our primary data storage. That should make running Nomulus on-prem much easier to achieve.

Hope this answers your questions and please feel free to reach out should you have any more questions.

Best,

Lai Jiang |

Software Engineer |

jian...@google.com |

212-565-6361

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[Patrício dos Santos]

Hi Lai

Thank you for your response. 

Looking forward to get Nomulus running on Kubernetes and using PostgreSQL . Will be so great

Regards

PS

[Momsecure]

Hi Lai,

As you said, it would be great to be able to deploy nomulus on all standalone platforms. Is there any progress on this possibility to date?

[Lai Jiang]

Hi,

We have completed the migration to using PostgreSQL as Nomulus's primary database and are in the process of removing database dependent code. We will then proceed to migrating the runtime to Kubernetes. If you'd like to know details about the migration, feel free to ask any questions you have.

Best,

Lai

Lai Jiang |

Software Engineer |

jian...@google.com |

212-565-6361

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nomulus-discuss/c8b39462-a4a5-4c0b-923e-4238670c876an%40googlegroups.com.

[Mohamed SOUNKERE]

Thanks Lai

Sure i'm very interested,

We want to use Nomulus to manage our registry. At this point is there a beta version we can test or how can we help to get a supported version for docker-compose, swarm or kubernetes.

Best,

Mohamed

[Lai Jiang]

Hi Mohamed,

We are still working on containerization of Nomulus. We have done some preliminary testing in which we run the Nomulus .war file with the Jetty runtime and were able to start the web server. This is a proof of concept for containerization but there is work to be done to make it run without error on Kubernetes. If this is something that you would like to contribute, we are more than happy to accept PRs or discuss what needs to be done.

Lai

Lai Jiang |

Software Engineer |

jian...@google.com |

212-565-6361

[Frank Livaudais]

Hi,

Can you let us know what progress has been made in getting this to run on k8s?  And would you be open to having a call with us to discuss best way forward?

Thanks,

Frank

[Lai Jiang]

Hi Frank,

We've been resource constrained lately, so things are not moving as fast as we'd like. Having said that, we did just reach a milestone where we've completely removed dependencies on Objectify, the abstraction layer that we have used to store data in datastore. In theory, at this point there's no technical barrier to taking the .war file with minimal modifications to the configuration web.xml file and running it on top of a Jetty base image. There are still practical blockers to actually using the said image for registry operations, as there are still runtime dependencies on several App Engine-specific APIs which would result in some functionalities of the registry not working properly out of the box.

We will be working on rectifying these blockers in the coming months. Can you let us know what use case you have in mind for Nomulus? We will certainly be happy to discuss more if you wish to adopt it, or even better, contribute to it.

Best,

Lai

Lai Jiang |

Software Engineer |

jian...@google.com |

212-565-6361

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nomulus-discuss/d41fff2a-2a9d-421b-882c-2f5581c203d0n%40googlegroups.com.

[Frank Livaudais]

We are planning on managing a small TLD registry and would like to deploy it into our infrastructure.

Thanks,

F

[Lawrence Olawale-Roberts]

On selecting Nomulus are the preferred backend solution for our Registry which would be offering a closed SLD to a professional sector in my country, we could not get past the installation in the cloud. Should we expect an update to the documentation anytime soon or an ability to deploy the solution on-premise.

Warm regards.

LOR

[Lai Jiang]

Hi Lawrence,

We are hoping that the installation  document will be refreshed sometime soon, as the folks at Cloudflare are also looking into setting up Nomulus and should have some up-to-date information to share. Regarding running Nomulus on-prem, that would not be realistic at this point as it still have many GCP dependencies like Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Cloud Tasks, etc. We are actively working on getting it to run in a generic docker container, so the best it will get in the near term is to run on an on-prem k8s cluster, but still with dependencies on GCP APIs. Decoupling the GCP dependencies is something that we ultimately want, but which we currently do not have the resources to work on. If you are interested in adding the necessary abstraction layer to decouple the GCP APIs, we certainly would love your contribution. Happy to schedule a more in-depth discussion if you would like.

Best,

Lai

Lai Jiang |

Software Engineer |

jian...@google.com |

212-565-6361

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nomulus-discuss/83de47ff-998b-463c-a43f-cbe63135929an%40googlegroups.com.

[Lawrence Olawale-Roberts]

Would love to take you up on your offer for a more in-depth discussion Lai

[Lai Jiang]

Sure! Is there a timeframe that works best for you?

Lai Jiang |

Software Engineer |

jian...@google.com |

212-565-6361

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nomulus-discuss/284a8e7b-3e19-4c1e-a64e-48e2120d8dcfn%40googlegroups.com.