Chuck Grimmett

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Tag: DNS

  • Powering a Blog Through Medium

    Medium is a wonderful network and editorial platform that allows anyone to share their stories and their ideas. It allows those who don’t want to run a full blog to publish their content easily. If you do want to start a full blog without the overhead of buying hosting or running a WordPress site, it is super easy to power your blog with a custom domainArchived Link through Medium. This means you can buy your own site name (i.e. http://amandagrimmett.com) and the Medium publication will show up there. Here is what you need to do:

    1. Sign up for a Medium account.
    2. Set up a new publicationArchived Link on Medium. Think of this as your blog.
    3. Fill out this form with your publication’s URL and what custom domain you want to point to it.
    4. Medium will respond within 12 hours with a list of A records and a CNAME record that you’ll need to add to your registrar. Here is a cheatsheet for you and Medium’s support pageArchived Link. This is a bit of a pain, but thankfully a good registrar like Hover can do this for you. Hover’s new Connect service presets the 12 A records for you and steps you through setting a CNAME record.
    5. Within a few hours your domain will point to your Medium publication and your blog will be live!

    I just set one up this weekend for my wife’s awesome new blog. I couldn’t believe how simple it was. My only frustration was the wait time between submitting the request and getting a response from Medium. It was a weekend though, so I can’t complain.

    Once it is set up, you log in through Medium and publish to it through the Medium platform. It has the benefit of being tied in to the entire Medium ecosystem, so sharing, commenting, and gaining followers is easy. You are constrained to the limits of their platform, but it does have some customization optionsArchived Link. This is perfect for those of you focusing on your writing.

    Go forth and write!

    Medium gif

  • DNS Terms Cheatsheet

    There are a lot more domain record terms than this, but these are the ones I most frequently encounter. I’ll add more as I run into them.

    Records

    Record Description Use
    A Address Record Point a domain to a specific IP address
    CNAME Canonical Name Record This is an alias of one name to another. Example: A CNAME of www.cagrimmett.com to cagrimmett.com tells the server to look for the WWW version wherever the non-WWW version’s A record resides. CNAME records must always point to another domain name, never directly to an IP address.
    MX Mail Exchange Record Direct’s a domain’s email to the server hosting the accounts. I most frequently use this for setting up Google Apps.
    NS Name Server Record Determines which servers will communicate DNS info for a domain. You usually have a primary and secondary. This site uses Cloudflare’s name servers.
    DNSKEY DNS Key Record The key record used in DNSSEC.

    Terms

    Term Full Name Description
    DNS Domain Name System Basically a phone book for the web. When you try to go to a domain (e.g. google.com) in your browser, the domain name system tells your browser where to find that domain, usually an IP address.
    TTL Time To Live How long it will take any change you make now to go into effect
    @ Self-referential character You don’t use the actual domain name in your DNS settings. Instead, you use the @ symbol to indicate the domain name.
    DNSSEC Domain Name System Security Extensions A set of protocols that add a layer of security to the DNS lookup and exchange processes.

  • Having trouble accessing your website from Google’s public DNS? Check your DNSSEC.

    I encountered a strange problem today. Someone could access their website from their cell phone but not their laptop and said a friend a few states away also couldn’t reach it. But I could reach it just fine.

    When we started digging into what was going on, I found that he was using Google’s public DNS. When I switched to Google’s DNS, I couldn’t reach the site either.

    So what is going on here? Apparently Google checks DNSSEC and a lot of other DNS resolvers do not. If it is misconfigured the site won’t resolve.

    Here is where you can check your domain’s DNSSEC.

    Need a fast and easy way to enable DNSSEC if your registrar doesn’t provide it? Check out Cloudflare.