Amazon Route 53 is a great way to manage the DNS entries of your cloud services. A key feature is its ability to map your domain apex such as “keyapt.com” to an elastic load balancer instance.
To actually create the mapping you use the Elastic Load Balancer CLI (command line interface). The command
- elb-associate-route53-hosted-zone
and to disassociate you use
- elb-disassociate-route53-hosted-zone
Last week I terminated and rebuilt my ElasticBeanstalk environment. A unintended consequence was that my load balancer name changed. Now keyapt.com was mapped to a non-existent load balancer. It was possible to associate the domain with the new load balancer but it was not possible to delete the old DNS entry. Perhaps unsurprisingly the DNS resolution of keyapt.com was unreliable, this could have been because of DNS propagation times but I think that having a orphan and erroneous DNS record pointing at the old load balancer was not helpful.
Others have had this problem.
These tools could not delete the orphan DNS record
(Updated 2011-10-12: added links to tools)
but R53 Fox could. You can download R53 Fox from sourceforge but there is no documentation.
These screenshots should help you. First you will need to enter your Amazon credentials so that you can download your zones. I have not shown this step. When you have done it you will see a screen containing one or more zones. Right click on the zone to see your choices. Choose “Resource Record Sets”.
The resource record set looks like:
Right click to get the pop-up menu and then left click to delete the orphan record.
Many thanks to Genki Sugawara for writing this life saving tool.
Note: In future I will avoid this problem by disassociating the domain before rebuilding the environment. Even so we may suffer from domain name propagation delays.
Dr James Bayley 
7 responses to “R53 Fox is great for managing Amazon Route53”
Hello,
I had tried out Amazon Route53 services. It is awesome service. DNS30 Professional Edition, which provide User Interface to Route53 services, is going to release very soon.We also have online interface for the same.
http://www.dns30.com/
Thank you for your comment please update this post when DNS30 support ELB load balancer alias records.
A more better online solution is https://nephelai.org/ – although this doesn’t support Alias records either, and the developer seems to have deserted the project, and not left any source code around for others to continue on the work. It’s a really nice interface and works really really well.
I’m actually forced to use this over r53fox because r53fox isn’t Firefox 7 compatible, and the developer for r53fox seems to just expect us to “wait”. Though when FF6 came out, r53fox was updated fairly quickly after. Doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.
Thanks for the tip. I am running Firefox 7.0.1 and R3 Fox is working for me but I have turned off automatic updates now because I don’t want to lose the functionality.
Hi I’m learning the R53 Fox tool. I don’t what I must enter as my account details in the account dialog. Can you please help me with that?
The account details are your AWS Access Key ID and your AWS Secret Access Key. You can find them by logging in to AWS using this link.
Thanks to SDB Explorer for the link format.
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