Secondary DNS From Godaddy: Things To Know

Written by Mark Jeftovic on September 18, 2012 — Leave a Comment

 

There are a lot of people moving their domains here from Godaddy lately. In addition to simply moving their DNS over to us completely – there are also many who are opting to stick with Godaddy and adding us on as secondary / additional DNS.

We remain advocates of "multi provider" DNS solutions but setting it up is always a bit more tricky. (If you do move over here completely, please do it in the sequence described in this post, to avoid any DNS outages resulting from Godaddy deleting your DNS settings before you are active here.)

The easyDNS docs on setting up secondary DNS are here and if you want TSIG also see this (note: TSIG support is now out of Beta)

The docs on Godaddy's side for setting up Secondary DNS are here.

Here are a few things you should know in terms of getting this working, specifically as it relates to using Godaddy as a master and easyDNS as the secondary:

Read more »

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Posted in Howto's and Help | Tagged , ,

Who are the Best Domain Registrars?

Written by Mark Jeftovic on September 14, 2012 — 2 Comments

Lifehacker is doing another"Who is the Best Registrar" survey, and of course we've been out there tweeting and #fb-ing for everybody to head on over there and vote….for us :) Of course.

But it got me thinking this morning, shameless self promotion aside, who are the best registrars out there? Aside from us, I mean.

A few come to mind: Read more »

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Posted in Industry Watch

How to Leave easyDNS

Written by Mark Jeftovic on September 13, 2012 — Leave a Comment

[ If you're interested in the backstory to this post, read on, if you want to skip straight to how to get the hell out here, skip down to How To Leave easyDNS ]

I have been listening to Doc Searls' The Intention Economy lately, it is an amazing book for a number of reasons – but suffice it to say (for now) that the book introduces "VRM" – Vendor Relationship Management. VRM is the natural compliment to CRM and is conspicuous in its absence from most business models. Yet if I may be so bold, it correctly describes the underlying ethos we feel here at easyDNS – where our underlying mantra since 1998 has been To Drive a stake through the heart of Lock-In in all it's forms. Read more »

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Posted in Of Interest

Workaround for switching off of Godaddy

Written by Mark Jeftovic on September 10, 2012 — Leave a Comment

We tread a fine line today as we pride ourselves in not chasing ambulances here. As we've pointed out before in our "DNS and DDOS attacks: how to stay up when your DNS provider goes down", DDoS attacks suck and it's the last reason we want to gain customers.

But we are experiencing higher than usual influx of domains from Godaddy this aft (because Godaddy's nameservers are down hard today) and we realize that a lot of people cannot switch over to our nameservers because they can't actually hit Godaddy's website.

The Workaround:

[ special thanks to Jesse Patching on twitter for the workaround to the workaround ]

For *nix geeks, put the entries below in your /etc/hosts

For non-geeks:

Apple: use textedit to edit your /etc/hosts file:

Windows: use a text editor to edit c:\etc\hosts.txt

In either case enter:

97.74.104.201 www.godaddy.com godaddy.com
216.69.149.90 idp.godaddy.com
216.69.149.9 dcc.godaddy.com
216.69.149.215 mya.godaddy.com
216.69.149.53 dns.godaddy.com

And save.

Then try accessing the website via your webbrowser and make your required changes.

 Also See:

Update #2

Jesse Patching supplied the updated host entries which enabled him to download his zonefiles, you can hopfully access other functionality as required after Godaddy put up their splash page (see below.)

Update:

Shortly after posting this, Godaddy pulled the main website (which was working using this workaround at the time we posted it) and replaced it with the following splash page, so now this won't work. Sorry to all who are marooned.

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Posted in Of Interest | Tagged

Hacking, Social Engineering and Your EasyDNS Account

Written by Leo Nicastro on August 15, 2012 — 4 Comments

You may have heard by now how Wired's Mat Honan was hacked. If you haven't, you can read about it here, but in a nutshell: hackers got into his Twitter and Gmail account after easily obtaining the last four digits of his credit card from his Amazon account. With that information, they were able to satisfy Apple's security questions. Apple's customer service then proceeded to reset his Me service which, in turn, allowed them to gain access to his email, then Gmail and Twitter. In the process they remotely wiped his iPhone, iPad and iBook. Because no backups had been done, Mat lost years of photos, documents and emails. All because of a questionable verification process.

Since those articles have appeared, I've had several customers voice their concerns about our security when it comes to social engineering tactics to gain access. The short answer is: we take it very seriously. Read more »

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Posted in Help and Support

14 years of easyDNS and Four Core Values

Written by Mark Jeftovic on July 31, 2012 — 9 Comments

easyDNS is 14 years old today! What a ride it's been.

We started the day on July 31st, 1998 as 3 founders, with no dependents and 0 customers. By the end of the day we had one dependent (co-founder John Schmidt's son was born during the day), and 0 customers. And by the end of the week we had….0 customers and 1 termsheet with a VC – that was never implemented as the VC later passed on investing in us.

Today we have 16 full-time employees here, a 17th in India, more kids and families than I can count (with a pair of twins on the way in this fall), 67,000 active customers in over 100 countries and about 130,000 domains under management.

While it may be true that we've never really hit the "big time" like, say Zynga or Groupon, all things considered, we're pretty happy with what we've accomplished. Especially since we did it without any external funding at all.

And in many ways, we're just getting started. While we may be "old" in internet years, in terms of "Built To Last" companies, we're still in the early stages. It took Sam Walton nearly 20 years to open his second store and lately I've been listening to a lot of Jason Jennings audiobooks: many of the companies he studies don't get interesting until around 20 or 30 years in. Read more »

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Posted in Of Interest

Web Forwarding during recent DDoS Attacks [Updated]

Written by easyDNS Support on July 25, 2012 — 5 Comments

(27/07/12) Update : Mitigation of the attack continues and webforwarding solutions have been implemented. Please see http://blog2.easydns.org/2012/07/26/another-ddos-attack-against-web-forwarding/ for details

(26/07/12) Update : the DDoS has moved on to the new servers, and both are now being affected. We regret any inconvenience, and continue to work to mitigate the attack.

—————————————————–

Our apologies if this sounds a bit technical.

During a denial of service attack, one of the mitigation tactics used is to null-route packets to IP addreses which are receiving too much traffic. Due to the recent DDoS (see http://blog2.easydns.org/2012/07/25/ddos-attack-july-25-2012/) , Cogent is currently null-routing the IP address of our web-forwarding service. This means that people browsing the web that go through Cogent may experience difficulties in reaching domains that are using easyDNS for URL forwarding or Stealth forwarding.

To alleviate this matter, we have set up an alternate web-forwarder for domains who are encountering issues with this.

To swap your webforwarding over to our alternate servers, log into your easyDNS account, go to the DNS Settings tab, and select either URL or STEALTH (depending on which you use)

You will see one of the following :

or

Click the highlighted link to switch over to our alternate forwarding pool.

Cogent users should start being able to see your site shortly afterwards (depending on thier local DNS cacheing times, of course)

When you go back to this part of your account you will now see an alert as follows :

Once the DDoS is over, we'll be providing a method to roll-back onto the primary servers, unless we come up with something more convenient or effective for our customers.

 

 

 

 

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Posted in Help and Support

MyPrivacy.net Whois Privacy now bundled with DNS Hosting level of service.

Written by Mark Jeftovic on July 25, 2012 — Leave a Comment

We have decided to bundle MyPrivacy.net Whois Privacy at the DNS Hosting level of service.

It is still a $4.95/year add-on at the DomainPlus level of service (and it is still also about half the cost compared to most other registrars).

For those members who have already paid for a MyPrivacy.net whois privacy upgrade at the DNS Hosting level of service, we will be depositing a full credit for each domain purchased into your member account. Read more »

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Posted in What's New | Tagged , ,

Ethics of the Fathers and our First Day in the New Office!

Written by Mark Jeftovic on July 13, 2012 — Leave a Comment

Today is our first day with the entire team in the new office! We're in 2 days ahead of schedule and the entire move squad, Arnon, Erol, Evan and especially Alex did amazing on logistics while Ranko and his girlfriend Maria pulled a rabbit out of a hat and configured a complete, ground up setup of our new phone system in about 3 days. Way to go everybody!

Read more »

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Posted in Of Interest

easyDNS is moving!

Written by easyDNS Support on July 11, 2012 — Leave a Comment

This Thursday (July 12), we will be moving our support team over to our new offices at 300a Dufferin St (just down the hall from our current site).

This move will not affect online services in any way (just moving phones and desks, no servers).

At 5pm EST we will be moving our phone system, which may result in some delays in agent response or brief interruptions in phone service for a short period. We will, however, still be taking calls until 6pm EST as always and are there to help.

We apologize in advance for any temporary inconvenience that may occur, and appreciate your understanding.

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Posted in What's New
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