[Tom McDonald: OpenSRS]
Hi folks,
Wow, there sure has been a lot of traffic on this list.
Unfortunately I've been in the dev side of things and failed to
join the list until just now.
It seems there is quite a bit of confusion as to, well, all facets
of the new system. I'll go over the general workings of the system
below. For those of you who are getting everything to work
already, this will seem a bit redundant and possibly quite boring
so I won't be offended if you >/dev/null this right now. Here
goes...
As an overview of the client end, there are three CGIs, a perl
library and a config file, along with some default templates. We
have also included cgi-lib.pl though most of you have this already.
Of the three CGIs, only two are really needed, one for registering
domains (either register.cgi or reg_system.cgi) and the other for
your users to be able to manage (manage.cgi) their domain contact
info once the domain has been registered.
---------- CGIs ------------------
register.cgi: This is geared towards those who have custom
processes in-house for managing domains once they have been
registered. It gives you the minimum requirements to register a
domain name though we would assume you would actually have a
front-end system built and this CGI is fed data in the background,
after you have secured payment for the domain, handled DNS on your
end, setup mail forwarding, etc. It is not recommended that this
be used directly on the end-user side in order to allow for domains
to be processed. when someone hits "Submit" at the bottom of that
form, the name is registered and your are going to be billed $13 by
Tucows. **Use Caution** when allowing access to this program.
reg_system.cgi: This program is designed to work with a backend we
have designed and which lives on the OpenSRS network. Using this
CGI, you can allow for registrations to be scanned before being
processed (or flag to process automatically), set prefs for sending
confirmation notes to your clients upon completion, run an
affiliate program, view stats regarding your domain lookup/actual
registrations and even send custom notes to your system so that you
can automate processes to do things like update your DNS when a
domain is registered, etc. This system also automatically handles
periods where the registry server may not be responding. You can
still take orders and if the RRP server is down, the OpenSRS
management system will keep all of the data for future attempts at
registration. There is also a complete order history, searchable
by order number, domain, date, etc. This is very handy for
handling customer inquiries regarding when a domain was registered
and possibly, what services were included. I like this a lot and
we plan on adding to it quite a bit in the near future.
manage.cgi: The name says it all. This is where your clients will
come in and manage their domain contact info, change nameservers if
needed, etc. Using the manage.cgi your clients will be able to
manage all domains they have registered through you in one session.
In addition, one action can update all of their records, especially
helpful if someone has ten domains and they have changed their
email address.
--------- End CGIs -------------------------
The templates included in the distribution should not be edited.
For those of you who asked about the double curly braces, those
are replaced when the template is sucked in by the CGIs.
The needed Perl modules. This is fairly self explanatory though if
y'all think it would be helpful to elaborate, let me know.
I suppose the largest area for confusion has been around where to
manage domains which have been registered through reg_system.cgi.
https://horizon.opensrs.net/~vpop/resellers/ Yes, please accept
the certificate. No Thawte cert there though trusty RavenSSL is
installed.
This is the area where you will login with your reseller login and
password. From here you can set your profile, etc. Remember, in
the test period, we are hitting the test RRP server which has
limited information. This means you'll want to use known good
nameservers for this testing period. Basically,
dns1.domaindirect.com and dns2.domaindirect.com will work for now.
The mechanism for changing your ISP password has been disabled for
just a short period. Should be back up tomorrow at some point.
That's it for the overview... questions?
Looking to the future, we plan on implementing features that you
folks as ISPs will find useful and will make it easier for you to
register domain names. Makes sense, the easier we make it for you
to register domains, the more domains get pumped through the
system. We'll look to you folks for more input once this system
gets a serious workout.
Finally, I've been handed a bit of the responsibility to update the
OpenSRS.org site. I'll be putting up a comprehensive FAQ which
will be updated largely based on this and the dev lists. Of
course, our wish-list or 'to-do' list will be up there as well.
First things first, let's get you folks registering domains and
then I'll be on Web duty.
-tom
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Tue Oct 19 2004 - 23:35:15 EDT