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QUICKSTART.md

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autoreverse Quick Start Guide

If you just want to get autoreverse running in a vanilla environment with no special features, the steps are:

  1. Create a forward delegation in your DNS
  2. Request a reverse delegation from your ISP or address provider
  3. Run autoreverse

1. Create a forward delegation in your DNS

autoreverse needs a name space to append to synthetic PTR responses which it also uses to respond to the forward queries on the synthetic names. The convention is to create a sub-domain, or delegation called "autoreverse" with the following snippet added to your zone file:

 $ORIGIN yourdomain.
 ;; Snippet starts
 autoreverse IN NS   autoreverse          ;; --forward name
             IN AAAA 2001:db8:aa:bb::53   ;; --listen address
             IN A    192.0.2.53           ;; --listen address
 ;; Snippet ends

(Obviously the AAAA and A addresses need tweaking to match the listen addresses you've allocated for autoreverse.)

2. Request a reverse delegation from your ISP or address provider

Normally you make a request to your ISP or address provider to arrange for the reverse delegation to your autoreverse instance. Your provider will want to know that autoreverse.yourdomain is the name server to add to the delegation. Unfortunately, some providers insist that your reverse name server responds to queries before they'll act on the delegation request. In this case read to the end of this guide, then revisit this section. But the short answer is to run autoreverse with --local-forward while the ISP verifies responsiveness.

3. Run autoreverse

You need three pieces of information to run autoreverse: listen addresses; the forward domain name created in the first step and the CIDR of your reverse assignment. Given those, you start autoreverse with:

# autoreverse --listen ipv4-addr --listen ipv6-addr --forward autoreverse.yourdomain --reverse reverse-CIDR

That's it. You're done. If your delgations in the global DNS are correct, autoreverse will find all the information it needs and start serving queries. To test this, perhaps try a reverse query with dig -x ip where "ip" is in range of the reverse-CIDR?

That pesky special case

You may need to deal with the special case mentioned in [Step 2](#2. Request a reverse delegation from your ISP or address provider) which is where your provider insists on autoreverse running first before they will delegate. Since autoreverse requires the --forward and --reverse delegations be in place before it starts, this requirement by your provider creates a "chicken-and-egg" dilemma.

If this is your situation, simply invoke autoreverse with --local-reverse in place of --reverse and autoreverse will run well enough for your provider to test the delegation and proceed with their delegation process.

Once the delegation has completed, revert the --local-reverse back to --reverse and autoreverse should pull in the "Zone of Authority" details from your ISP's delegation.