Tagged “Devops”

Fix Your Email Deliverability with DMARC

If you do anything more advanced with email than hitting "Send" in Gmail then you should care about deliverability, which is the likelyhood that your email will end up in your intended recipient's inbox instead of their spam folder.

Know How To Roll (Your SSL Certificates)

A few weeks ago Stripe's SSL certificate became invalid, along with several other major sites. Their certificate didn't expire, their certificate authority's root certificate did. This shouldn't happen, but as with most terrible things it crops up at rather inconvenient times.

There's not much you can do to protect yourself against a service provider's certificate expiring, but you can proactively protect yourself against your own certificate expiring. The biggest thing to do is have a schedule and a process.

How and why I'm not running my own DNS

A few months ago I posted about how I run my own DNS servers using my virtual private servers and tinydns. Well, it turns out that's not a great idea, for a few reasons. First, because if I mess up I'm entirely shut out of my servers. I tried to turn off a service on them the other day and accidentally turned of the tinydns service instead and it took me ages to get back in. Running DNS on the same machines that handle email and web hosting for almost every piece of my online presence is just way too fragile.

How I run my own DNS servers

For the longest time I used zoneedit as my DNS provider of choice. All of my important domains were hosted there, they never really did me wrong. A few months back I decided that I wanted to learn how DNS actually works in the real world, though. Like, what does it actually take to run my own DNS servers?