Introduction

DYN has been widely adopted by enterprise organizations and service providers because of its ease of deployment, performance, security, and unparalleled features. After the acquisition in 2016, DYN powered the DNS services of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and after this long period of time, the moment when this service will be End of Life is set for 31st of May 2023.

The race is on to migrate the services before this date. This blog covers the migration from DYN to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure DNS.

What you will need before starting the migration

Currently, the migration process doesn't support the Advanced Services from DYN, each Service should be investigated individually and understand which is the OCI replacement.
The following capabilities are not currently supported in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure DNS:
- DNSSEC;
- External Nameservers;
- Dynamic DNS;
- Secondary DNS status notifications;
- Zone Publish notifications;
- Advanced Services notification for monitoring agent changes.

Currently,the migration process doesn't support the Advanced Services from DYN each Service should be investigated individually and understand which is the OCI replacement.
The following capabilities are not currently supported in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure DNS:
- DNSSEC;
- External Nameservers;
- Dynamic DNS;
- Secondary DNS status notifications;
- Zone Publish notifications;
- Advanced Services notification for monitoring agent changes.

Navigate to the Migration Portal, look up individual Services, and read the migration process for each service.

We highly recommend creating a report for the services used by each zone. You can achieve this by logging into your DYN account, navigating to the View Reports section, and select the Services Report.

Plan for each service on how to bring it to OCI in addition to the DNS migration.

The Migrations Process is a zone export from DYN and an import of it to OCI. The zone file should not have Advanced Services, so after the user downloads the zone, should clean those services from the file.
The article assumes that the customer has a DYN tenancy where he has the DNS zones and an OCI tenancy.

Please be aware that the provisioning of your OCI tenancy might take some time. Plan for this in advance!

Export/Import a zone manually

With this process, the customer exports each individual DNS zone manually and imports it to OCI manually.
The following credentials are required for the migration:

• Access to a DYN account with a user that has permission to export a zone file.
• Access to an OCI tenancy with a user that has permission to create a DNS zone.

Get ready to migrate one DNS zone from DYN to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with the simple steps described below:

1. Login to the DYN tenancy, navigate to Manage DNS and click Manage on the zone you want to migrate.
2. Under Zone Reports, Download the Zone File.
   
3. Login to the OCI tenancy, navigate to Networking > DNS Management > Zones, and Create Zone
   
4. Check the zone file for Advanced Services configuration and remove them for the file.
5. Import the downloaded zone file and create the zone.
   
6. Check the DNS records imported in OCI DNS zone to see that all the records were imported.
7. When you want to switch from the DYN DNS servers to the OCI DNS servers, modify the name servers from the domain registrar to point to the OCI servers assigned when the zone was imported.
8. Modify the name servers from the domain registrar to point to the OCI servers assigned when the zone was imported.
   

Export/Import a zone automatically

The Manual migration is very simple but when a customer has multiple zones, this method is not a fun task. This section covers a more programmatic approach to zone migration.
This migration is suited for customers that have a good understanding of their DYN account and knows that no Advanced Services are used the zone that is been migrated.
This process involves additional tools that the customer installs on a computer.
Below you can find the prerequisites for this task:

• Access to a DYN account with a user that has permission to:
  • modify the list of external DNS servers;
  • create an API user with permission to export a zone.
• Access to an OCI tenancy with a user that has permission to create a DNS zone.
• Access to a Linux OS system that will have Python and the OCI CLI installed.

For this exercise, we will use a VM in OCI which will have an OEL Linux image, where we will install the prerequisites. The blog is not covering the creation of the VM and the underlying infrastructure.
The first prerequisite is to have the OCI CLI installed on the VM. We will use this link to install it on OEL8. At the end of this task, the OCI CLI is configured and the public key is uploaded to the OCI tenancy under the user that we will use to connect.

Next We will need to download this python script which migrates a single zone from DYN to OCI directly. This script is using the zone transfer (AXFR) from DYN to the Linux VM and the OCI CLI to import the zone from that VM to the OCI tenancy.
Because OCI CLI was installed and configured, the only installation is made for the python modules. Issue sudo pip3 install oci dnspython requests dyn .

[opc@dyndns ~]$ python3 migrate_zone.py
usage: migrate_zone.py [-h] [--dynect-password DYNECT_PASSWORD]
                       [--oci-compartment OCI_COMPARTMENT]
                       [--oci-config-file OCI_CONFIG_FILE]
                       [--oci-config-profile OCI_CONFIG_PROFILE]
                       [--tsig-key-compartment TSIG_KEY_COMPARTMENT]
                       zone_name dynect_customer dynect_username
migrate_zone.py: error: the followin