Readit News logoReadit News

Deleted Comment

mrideout commented on IO name servers down    · Posted by u/gator-io
nodesocket · 8 years ago
Same here for my startup commando.io. Using AWS Route53. What DNS provider are you using?
mrideout · 8 years ago
I run a DNS monitoring service and have had a number of customers contact me about this in the past couple hours. Most of them were using Route53, but this is an issue with the IO authoritative nameservers, rather than Route53 itself.
mrideout commented on Show HN: DNS Check – A tool for monitoring all your DNS records   dnscheck.co/... · Posted by u/mrideout
mrideout · 10 years ago
Hi, I'm Matt, the creator of this tool.

I created DNS Check because I wanted to be able to easily import all my DNS records (not just the A and AAAA records) into a tool that would automatically monitor them, and notify me if they change. I couldn't find any existing tools that do that, so I created one.

If you have any questions, or suggestions for how to improve this tool, I'd love to know.

mrideout commented on DNS Outage at DigitalOcean   status.digitalocean.com/... · Posted by u/finne
tonyarkles · 10 years ago
The flipside to the dog food point: if DigitalOcean did use their own nameservers for their main site, then we wouldn't have been able to see the status page.
mrideout · 10 years ago
Good point!
mrideout commented on DNS Outage at DigitalOcean   status.digitalocean.com/... · Posted by u/finne
fredophile · 10 years ago
I don't have anything more important than a small personal website but now I'm curious. If you set up a system to handle your main DNS provider failing, how do you test it? Is there a good reference where I can find some best practices on this?
mrideout · 10 years ago
Here's my testing recommendation:

1. Pick some subset of your DNS records to monitor, or all of them if you want to be extra thorough. If you are picking a subset, then I'd pick whatever records are most critical to your business.

2. Setup monitoring that queries each of your authoritative name servers for each of the records that you identified in the previous step. The monitoring should notify you if any of the name servers are unresponsive, or return a different response than what's expected.

If you'd like to dig into the details of DNS, then O'Reilly's "DNS and BIND" is highly recommended, even if you're not using BIND.

There are a number of quality hosting providers out there. A rule of thumb that I use is this: If a DNS hosting provider doesn't eat their own dog food, don't trust them to handle your DNS. Digital Ocean doesn't use their own name servers for their main website's domain. Neither does Amazon.

Shameless plug: I created a DNS monitoring service that can be used used for monitoring each of your name servers: https://www.dnscheck.co/

mrideout commented on Free Transactional Email Services – The Best Alternatives to Mandrill and Co   metachris.com/2016/03/fre... · Posted by u/foolala
Geee · 10 years ago
This is a bit misleading. For example, in serious use you need the domain whitelabeling on Sendgrid which requires the monthly $75 plan. Otherwise you get the 'sent via Sendgrid' message in most email clients. I'm not sure about those other providers.
mrideout · 10 years ago
Are you sure that's still the case? I recently switched one of my site's transactional mail from a free Mandrill account to a free SendGrid account, and have not seen this issue.

I'm assuming that the issue you're referring to is triggered by the presence of a Sender header. The Sender header is present in the emails that SendGrid sends for the site in question.

The Return-Path and From address are at the domains that I specified (e.dnscheck.co and dnscheck.co).

Perhaps this is something that has recently changed, or is only an issue with certain configurations.

mrideout commented on Check Your MX Records   dnscheck.co/blog/dns-moni... · Posted by u/mrideout
Sephr · 10 years ago
This just looks like an ad for your service, Matt (which is usually okay and encouraged on HN, but this site requires signup to do anything). You should also use first person in your submission title as not to obscure your relation to the site.
mrideout · 10 years ago
Thanks for the feedback, Sephr. I'm new to posting on HN, and want to make sure I don't repeat any mistakes that were made when sharing this article.

I am the author of the article, and certainly don't want to obscure that. I'm gathering from your feedback that submitting this article to HN with a title of "How I Check My MX Records" would be more appropriate. Is that correct?

The article discusses MX record concepts, and potential problems, followed by three methods for checking MX records. Using the dig and nslookup commands are the first two methods, and the DNS Check service is the third. My intent is for the article to be be useful for someone using any of those options. Is sharing that type of article discouraged on HN?

I read through https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html before posting, and thought I was following those guidelines. Are there any additional guidelines that you recommend I review?

u/mrideout

KarmaCake day22October 17, 2015
About
I run a DNS monitoring service: https://www.dnscheck.co/
View Original