DNS

I’ve switched nameservers for all my domains yesterday. During the past many years I’ve been free-riding on GratisDNS and enjoying their free DNS service (and luckily never needed support in their forums).

Yesterday I switched to Cloudflare and I’m using them for DNS for this (and other domains). I don’t have any particular requirements, and the switch was mostly easy and automated to the extent possible. Two domains went smooth, but the last my mahler.io domain went a stray a few hours during the switch.

Get your company implementing DMARC now…

During the past 5-6 years email industry efforts have been pushing the DMARC standard along. It provides the best widely supported and seemingly efficient way to - as a domain-owner - protect the domain from misuse and abuse in terms of spam and phishing attacks.

As sending email has often been a wild-west, and knowing who is a valid sender of email may prove a challenge for many companies - and as most IT developers does seem to care too much about the finer details of email (and production just as bad email headers as HTML markup :-) ), implementing DMARC protection on your domain may actually be a challenge.

Here’s a little trick, which is has proven itself just as useful as it is easy. To most companies handling domains is critical task, as losing your domain name may have catastrophic consequences. Handling domains isn’t particularly hard, but there are some tasks, that may be time-critical to handle in due time - luckily Google Calendar provides an easy way to help make sure these tasks are handled.

(In this little tip, I’m using Google Calendar as the reference, but Outlook.com, Office365 or any other online calendaring system can probably do the same.)

For some time the server running this site had been acting up. Page loads were slow, access through SSH seemed lagging and something was absolutely misbehaving.

I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly was going on, but nothing really made sense. there were plenty of disk space, memory was reasonable utilized (no swapping) and the CPU load seemed to be less than 0.1 at any time - there were no good reason the server was “turtling” along at such a perceived slow pace.