Documentation
AUTONIC:  V3.0


System Requirements

  • Ability to run cronjobs
  • Perl 5
  • Sendmail or Qmail
  • Telnet access recommended

Preliminaries

  • Determine the path to PERL 5 on your web server host.  Note that some web hosting companies run both PERL 4 and PERL 5.  Make ABSOLUTELY sure you are not setting this up under PERL 4.  Ask your administrator if you are not sure.
  • Download the tarfile for this program and save it to your desktop.
  • Unpack the tar archive on your desktop using a program that unpacks UNIX TAR ARCHIVES. If you don't have such a program then download WINZIP FREE from SHAREWARE.COM
  • After you have unpacked the TAR archive you will have a collection of folders and files on your desktop.  Now you have to do some basic editing of each of these files (or at least some of them).  Use a text editor such as wordpad, notepad, BBEdit, simpletext, or teachtext to edit the files.  These are NOT WORD PROCESSOR DOCUMENTS they are just simple TEXT files so don't save them as word processor documents or save them with extentions such as .txt or they will NOT WORK.   Note that there may be a some files inside of folders which are "blank".   This is normal.

Preparing the CGI scripts

Define Path To PERL 5

The first step is to open up each and every file that has a .cgi extention and edit line number one of each script.  Each of the cgi scripts is written in perl 5. For your scripts to run they must know where perl 5 is installed on your web server. The path to perl 5 is defined to a cgi script in the first line of the file. In each of the cgi scripts the first line of code looks something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

If the path to perl 5 on your web server is different from /usr/bin/perl you must edit the first line of each cgi script to reflect the correct path. If the path to perl 5 is the same no changes are necessary. If you do not know the path to perl 5 ask the webmaster or system administrator at your server site.  

Configure the .cgi files

autonic.cgi

This is the entire cgi.  There are several variables to edit, all of which should be pretty straightforward.

  • $domainlist = "/full/path/to/domains.txt";
  • $mailprog = Path to sendmail on your server
  • $email = Your email address (include backslash)
  • $nicemail = NIC email address (include backslash - don't change this though)
  • $organization = "your organization name";
  • $address = "your street address";
  • $city = "name of city";
  • $state = "your state";
  • $zip = "your zip code";
  • $countrycode = "ISO Country code (or US for USA)";
  • $nichandle = "your NIC handle";
  • $purpose = "Expansion of Content Services";
  • $primaryhostname = "ns1.yourdnsserver.com";
  • $secondaryhostname = "ns2.yourdnsserver.com";
  • $primaryserveraddress = "111.111.1111";
  • $secondaryserveraddress = "222.222.2222";

Upload Your Edited CGI and Database Files

  • Upload all of the cgi files (.cgi) into your cgi-bin
  • Upload the domains.txt file into your cgi-bin
  • If you are also using domain vulture install both files in the same directory as the vulture cgi files

File Access Permissions

File access permissions must be set correctly for this program to run.  You must set the access permissions for each of these files.  Set autonic.cgi to 755.   Set the domains.txt to 777.

Running from Command Line

Login via telnet and type

perl autonic.cgi

Automating with Crontab

There is a sample crontab file (crontab) which shows the entries to run this every morning when internic reboots every 5 minutes beginning at 5 am (server time) until 7 am (server time).  Internic reboots around 5-6 am EST but this varies from day to day.  You will want to customize this somewhat depending on your time zone.  Make sure you know what time zone your SERVER is on - not the timezone YOU are on since cron only cares about the server time.