Changing My DNS Provider to DNSimple – What DNS Record?

Posted on July 4, 2014 Written by 49 Comments

 

Problem with my current DNS provider – GoDaddy.com

I made a blog post two years ago on how I setup this site File -> New Blog Project. As of this writing, this site is using WordPress and GoDaddy.com for web hosting and DNS. Lately, I have noticed that sometimes I cannot access my website noelarlante.com and its admin page. Its maybe my internet provider is slow? or my internet is totally down? A quick access to Google proves otherwise.

I did a trace route to noelarlante.com and to my surprise I got timeouts (* * *) on after a certain ip address. My main hosting ip address is working which means the domain name resolution is not working due to the time out.

Traceroute has started…

traceroute to noelarlante.com (203.124.115.1), 64 hops max, 72 byte packets

 1  192.168.11.1 (192.168.11.1)  1.474 ms  1.515 ms  1.011 ms

 2  192.168.254.254 (192.168.254.254)  1.785 ms  1.685 ms  1.584 ms

 3  180.191.75.1 (180.191.75.1)  17.557 ms  17.863 ms  17.545 ms

 4  10.109.9.65 (10.109.9.65)  17.431 ms  21.192 ms  17.735 ms

 5  120.28.0.193 (120.28.0.193)  18.478 ms  23.496 ms  17.978 ms

 6  120.28.10.93 (120.28.10.93)  18.563 ms  21.173 ms  18.075 ms

 7  120.28.4.94 (120.28.4.94)  49.112 ms  52.709 ms  48.848 ms

 8  203.169.57.37 (203.169.57.37)  48.052 ms  48.126 ms  46.980 ms

 9  xe-5-2-0-xcr1.sgs.cw.net (195.2.10.214)  87.515 ms  86.563 ms  86.042 ms

10  ae0-xcr1.sng.cw.net (195.2.10.149)  77.411 ms  78.375 ms  76.861 ms

11  * * *

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Although I still have two more years with GoDaddy DNS, but I have decided to try and use DNSimple.

Moving My DNS service to DNSimple

DNSimple Support page provides a topic on How Transfer Domain Without a Downtime,  which is the perfect information I need to prevent downtime for my website. Transferring a domain to DNSimple was painless. Its just that I missed a step that ended my site to be down for a day – more on that next.

DNS DNSimpleDomainAddTransfer

Steps on transferring a domain without a downtime

Here are the steps on how to transfer a domain to DNSimple without a downtime based from the Support page of DNSimple. I’ve highlighted the one step I’ve missed.

After doing the *ALL* the steps I thought that I will just need to wait for the DNS to propagate to all servers and then thats it, transfer done. But after awhile I tried to hit noelarlante.com but I got a “Host Unreachable” error on my browser. Something is wrong and I soon figured that there is a disconnect from my DNS to my hosting server.

Problem Solved – I Missed Adding DNS Records

According to Wiki – DNS records or resource records (RR) is the basic data element in the domain name system.
There are many record types that you can use. DNSimple support has the information about each of them – http://support.dnsimple.com/categories/dns/

 I only care about A, CNAME

A – An A record is an Address. This is the record that maps the address i.e. noelarlante.com to my hosting site

CNAME – CNAME is short for Canonical Name. It is the record that maps an alias to an address. The “www” is considered an alias or an address going to noelarlante.com. If no CNAME with “www” is added to the DNS record, www.noelarlante.com will not be resolved to noelarlante.com.
DNS DNSimpleAddAliasRecord

DNS DNSimpleDNSRecords

I got my website a new DNS service provider and so far I’m happy with the response time when I visit my site. This is not in anyway a paid advertisement for DNSimple, I’m just sharing my experience and hope others can find this post and not forget that DNS record step.

 

Filed Under: Blog, Web, Web Hosting, Windows Tagged: , , , ,

Windows 8 Consumer Preview Installation Options

Posted on March 7, 2012 Written by 1 Comment

windows 8 consumer preview beta fish

Windows 8 Consumer Preview Installation Options

I’m sure you have seen Windows 8 Consumer Preview installed to a virtual machine or an actual machine or slate(Tablet). I was able to install and try the Windows 8 Consumer preview myself and I was really surprised how smooth and responsive the system is. Kudos to the Windows team of Microsoft, this is far from the Windows 8 Developers Preview I’ve tried last year.

Curious enough? Install Windows 8 Consumer Preview with the options below and try it for yourself.

First, the Windows 8 Consumer Preview download sources:

(a) MSDN Subscription – http://msdn.microsoft.com
I got my installer from MSDN download since we have volume license and the source server is different from public so downloading is faster 😉

Msdn windows 8 consumer preview links

I’m not sure what “with Apps” means but yes this is the installer you want to download.

(b) Download from Microsoft.com – http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/download
This is where Microsoft published the public download location of Windows 8 Consumer preview. 1 million downloads for the first few hours of release according to Microsoft.

Add “iso” to get the ISO version of the installer – http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/download/iso

Target environments: Where can it run?

Boot from VHD – I have not tried this before I came across the post of Scott Hanselman on Windows 8 Boot from VHD post. Boot from VHD is only available if you have Windows 7 Enterprise and up version of Windows 7. Also take note that you cannot boot from a VHD hosted in a BitLocker enabled partition. It will not work either if you Suspend the BitLocker. Only way is decrypt the drive or use a different hard drive or partition without BitLocker.

Another approach to boot Windows 8 from VHD is to use the Windows Automated Installation Kit for Windows 7. Eric Boyd has posted the detailed instructions on how to do this on his website – How To Install Windows 8 with Native Boot to VHD.

Both approaches will make use of BCDEDIT and DISKPART commands which is fun!

Parallels Desktop as Virtual Machine – I have version 7 of Parallels for Mac to run my virtual machines. Installation using Parallels is as smooth as if you install directly to a physical machine though I would still prefer to have the boot from VHD option since its using the actual hardware and only the hard drive is virtualized.

Windows 8 Consumer Preview desktop

All of my Windows VM machines works flawlessly with Parallels. I got more VMs installed as you can see 🙂

Windows 8 Consumer Preview Parallels virtual machine list

Windows Virtual PC – Using a Windows Virtual PC is the common approach if you want to install a Windows virtual machine. But it seems Windows Virtual PC is NOT ready yet for Windows 8 (I’ve tried both 32-bit and 64-bit). I got a boot error from Windows 8 Consumer Preview 64-bit installation and an unhappy face for Windows 8 32-bit version.

Windows 8 Consumer Preview 64bit on VirtualPC

Error on 64 bit

Windows 8 Consumer Preview 32Bit on Virtual PC

Error on 32 bit

I was not expecting not to be able to run Windows 8 with Windows Virtual PC. I may need to install an updated version of virtual PC or allocate more memory perhaps? I will just use the boot from VHD approach or the Parallels for now, not a problem! 🙂

I’m excited to see the final release of Windows 8 soon! Metro-style user interface is really nice and it goes well with other Microsoft systems particularly the Windows Phone 7. These early releases and previews will give developers more time to create applications that will adopt the new system and address the bugs.

Everyone can participate in reporting a bug in the Windows 8 forum – http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8. Make your bug count!

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Filed Under: Blog, Microsoft Tagged: , , ,

File -> New Blog Project

Posted on February 25, 2012 Written by 3 Comments

 

I’ve been wanting to put up my blog and finally here it is, my first blog with my first blog post. While Twitter, Facebook or Google+ is a good way to share information, it still best to have that information shared in a blog for the reason that the information on this blog will exist in the internet until I decide to return a HTTP 401 error code for this blog. I’ve learned the 401 Gone and “Infosuicide” from a blog post of Scott Hanselman.

I’m a technical person and I have a good knowledge on the internet or the web in general but not particularly on having your own blog site. The numerous options you have nowadays to setup a website or a blog sometimes work against you. So how did I setup my blog site?

CMS
Content Management System’s role is to present an interface to manage your content. Of course there are more things happening in the background in a CMS application than a simple interface. In short, you provide the content and then customize your content using the CMS.
My plan is to have a CMS that will work on .Net (Windows). I was initially looking into DotNetNuke, Umbraco, dasBlog or WordPress. WordPress being the last since I thought WordPress will not work with Windows hosting.
I was looking more into using dasBlog since user feedback says its fast because it does not use a database but instead store the contents in a XML. But, dasBlog does not have any update since March 2009 and I thought it will not have an update anytime soon. I would want to keep my blog be customizable enough to play with the latest plugins and widgets available, so I decided to use WordPress.

Domain
I need a domain name for my blog. I decided to search and buy from GoDaddy.com since I’ve experienced excellent customer support from them in the past. Also GoDaddy.com currently have discounts for buying new domain names.

Hosting (Free or Paid) / (Linux/Windows)
For hosting, since I would like to have .Net project  be hosted in the future, I got a Windows hosting from GoDaddy.com. I got a good promo code to avail of the promo sale of GoDaddy for hosting as well.

I’m not sure if this is the best approach for setting up a blog site but I hope the information here will encourage more to set up their websites since the tools and services you need are available and its fairly easy to set up one. More updates on my site on the coming days! See you around!

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged: , , ,