Amazon Route 53 can be used to route end users to multiple AWS services including Amazon EC2, an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer or an Amazon S3 bucket, and to infrastructure outside of AWS.

Route 53 features a self-service design with a pay-as-you-go model where users pay only for managing domains through the service and the number of queries that the service answers.

Amazon Route 53 uses a network of DNS servers located across the globe, which  allows businesses to keep their web applications available. Amazon Route 53 also lets users place controls over who can manage their DNS system by allowing integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

“Our customers have asked for a DNS service with all the same qualities of the other AWS services that they use every day – flexible, scalable, no commitment, inexpensive, and pay-as-you go,” said Tal Saraf, General Manager of Amazon CloudFront.

“That’s exactly what Amazon Route 53 provides. Now AWS customers who need a DNS service don’t have to work with a separate provider and instead can get this additional infrastructure service with the AWS platform.”

Google says the service is part of its ongoing effort to make the web faster. This is an initiative that the company stresses time and time again. In its announcement, the company says:

Most of us aren’t familiar with DNS because it’s often handled automatically by our Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it provides an essential function for the web. You could think of it as the switchboard of the Internet, converting easy-to-remember domain names — e.g., www.google.com — into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers — e.g., 74.125.45.100 — that computers use to communicate with one another.

The average Internet user ends up performing hundreds of DNS lookups each day, and some complex pages require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading. This can slow down the browsing experience. Our research has shown that speed matters to Internet users, so over the past several months our engineers have been working to make improvements to our public DNS resolver to make users’ web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable. You can read about the specific technical improvements we’ve made in our product documentation and get installation instructions from our product website.

Privacy

Google says Google Public DNS complies with the company’s main privacy policy. Google collects the IP address (temporarily), ISP, and location information (in permanent logs) to make the service "faster, better, and more secure."  They use the data to conduct debugging, analyze abuse, and improve prefetching. Any IP info is erased after 24 hours. No information collected is stored with the user’s Google account, they don’t share the data with anyone, and they don’t use information with any other Google products.

Google has information available on setting up Google Public DNS on your computer or router at the Google Code Blog. The product page has additional info, and the FAQ page goes into support and technical information.

Related Articles:

> Google Launches Site Performance Feature

> Google Announces SPDY Application-Layer Protocol

> Google Provides Tool For Speeding Up Web Pages

Although the details behind the DNS flaw were leaked ahead of Kaminsky’s talk at the Black Hat Conference, numerous nameservers around the Internet received a crucial fix even before the leak.

Getting those nameservers patched started for admins on July 9, when a number of major technology vendors jointly released a patch for the problem. Left unpatched, a vulnerable system could be tricked into sending people requesting a given domain name to a different domain.

That would be a conduit to stealing personal information and/or infecting the arriving visitor’s machine. Making the patch available required a significant effort, one that Kaminsky credited the industry with taking during his Black Hat talk.

“The industry rallied pretty ridiculously to do something about this, with hundreds of milllions protected,” Kaminsky noted in presentation slides he made available on his blog.

Administrators for Apple systems running DNS will see a patch among the items arriving in a newly-released security update for their OS X operating system. The widely discussed cache poisoning flaw could cause a nameserver to return forged information to a system requesting it.

Numerous major vendors met earlier in the year to discuss the problem with DNS. On July 8, Microsoft, Cisco, and others released a patch to address what has been described as the most serious flaw ever seen online.

Exploit code quickly became available once a security researcher, Halvar Flake, speculated on the nature of the flaw. A security firm briefed on the flaw confirmed the hypothesis with a blog post they published and subsequently withdrew, unfortunately not before many witnessed that confirmation.

If exploited, a cracked nameserver could redirect requests for websites to any site of the attacker’s choosing. Couple that with a well-forged financial site, and the criminal owns an easy way to steal personal information with no indication to the victim about the event.

The BIND nameserver is turned off by default in OS X, limiting the scope of the vulnerability on the platform. But considering the deep roots OS X has in Unix-type operating systems, it seems strange the company took so long to follow the rest of the industry in patching DNS.

Improvements include:

• Site owners can now see their own backlinks.
• Verify an IP address is really Googlebot done but by using a reverse+forward DNS lookup.
• An option to easily remove URLs from the index. Google’s URL removal tool has been ported into the webmaster console, and it allows site owners to see and revoke their self-removals.
• Show how many people are subscribed to my website’s feeds in Google Reader: DONE, but not in the console. Google Reader now reports these numbers when fetching feeds. Feedburner will give you even more stats for free.
• Communicate with webmasters in an authenticated way: DONE. Just last week, Google added a webmaster message center provide authenticated communication with site owners. The Webmaster Central team has done of ton of other stuff in the last few months as well.

Upcoming features will be based on the list below:

• More information about penalties or other scoring issues
• Tools for detecting or reporting duplicate content
• Show links on your site that are broken
• Score the crawlability or accessibility of pages
• Tool to help move from one domain to a new domain
• Tell Google the correct country or language for a site
• Show PageRank numbers instead of none/low/medium/high
• Diagnostic wizard for common site problems
• Some type of rank checking
• Show causes of 404 errors
• A way to list supplemental result pages
• Option to "disavow" backlinks from or to a site
• Fetch a page as Googlebot to verify correct behavior
• Tell Google a parameter doesn’t matter
• More documentation and examples
• Ability to show/download all pages from a site (e.g. if your server crashed)
• Integrate "Add URL" feature.

If you have more ideas, post your suggestions at his blog.

Comments

“GNYPost.com Suffering DNS Issue”

A funny thing happened on the way to NYPost.com to read about the recent Alex Rodriguez gossip talk. My browser sent me to another domain. I tried the request in a couple of different browsers, all with the same result.

After checking the old hosts file for any weirdness, I decided to give someone a call and see what was up. The phone number for the Post in the whois lookup went to voicemail, and the technical contact information proved to be incorrect.

Fortunately, someone at what appeared to be the Post’s service provider was able to give me numbers to the correct business, Quality Technology Services. Someone named Monica answered, and when I asked about the Post’s issue, she said they were aware of it.

Even though I identified myself when she answered, she asked if I was a contact. I said no, I was a reporter who had stumbled upon what appeared to be a DNS issue. When I tried to ask her another question, I was delighted that she immediately hung up on me.

Hey Rupert Murdoch, it’s 7:30 pm on the East Coast. Do you know where your domain is right now? Because your technical services company doesn’t seem to have it under control yet. I’ve helpfully attached a screenshot to this article, please see below.

He replied, “Because I’m not sure which Kim is present, so I’m looking harder to see who’s there.”

I laughed, because I don’t know either.

This got me to thinking about target markets and end users.

What Side of the Bed Did Your Customer Get Up On Today?

In marketing and user centered design circles, we often talk about our targeted users and customers. Companies with money to blow will run studies on who their target consumers are, or run focus groups on what people love and hate about their products. The human factors industry studies human-computer behavior. Usability companies try to understand what ticks off end users. Conversions experts look for all the reasons behind failed sales. Search engine marketers dig deep for keywords used by the perfect end user who knows exactly what they’re looking for.

Once all this data is gathered, white papers are written, case studies are published and articles are run that inform us about what our site visitors and product users want, what they like, how they make choices and why. We may think we’re very cool and savvy to have found the holy grail of ROI.

What if your product, service, internet application or website is humming along, primed for the perfect targeted end user and that person is suddenly different?

Perhaps they are emotionally upset. PMS. Menopausal. Facing surgery. Sleepless parents. Overworked wage earners. Out of work. On medication. Depressed. Drunk. Suffers a sudden loss of eyesight or use of their hands. There are a zillion reasons why someone has an “off” day, is feeling emotionally or mentally out of whack or drastically changes in some way. This can last for a day, or longer.

Either way, what they are dealing with, at the moment they are accessing your website, service, product or application, may have an impact on how successful they are at completing a task.

How Would You Know Something Changed?

My husband stares into my soul to try and figure out what’s up, but we don’t have this ability to inquire on the status of our end users and customers.

We’re unable to make instant adjustments, which may be needed for the successful completion of a task, for example.

Have you ever been in a car accident, and needed to call for emergency help with your cell phone? If you are injured or shaken up, holding a tiny phone or speaking into it with trembling hands makes a difference in how it is used in comparison to typical user testing in a calm environment.

Or, what if your customer is a long-time regular, who orders the same products over and over again, but some kind of life changing event occurs and that product no longer applies and they need something else?

Would your server tracking data be able to tell you about all these possible events in user behavior, or would you simply look at the data with a wierd look on your face, like my husband does with me, wondering what the hell is going on?

I got to thinking about this when I read
Shari Thurow Talking Smack about Eye Tracking? Gord Hotchkiss’s company does eye tracking studies. He’s concerned because he thinks Shari Thurow, in a recent article, may feel that eye tracking offers limited information. Taken in one brief, limited chunk, yes it does and he agrees. Gord concludes:

“Shari says we don’t focus on the big picture. Shari, you should know that you can’t see the big picture until you fill in the individual pieces of the puzzle.”

And that got me to thinking about the look of my face.

If an eye tracking study was done on me every day, or at various days in a month or week, would my eyes do something differently?

Would I make different choices, based on where I looked, which is based on how I feel or what my environment is at that moment?

Do we ever really know our target end users?

Elsewhere, Fun and Intriguing

Joe Dolson is Talkin’ about user choices…, and asks, “How might a user react to a radical change in the basic functionality of a site?”. Well, that depends Joe. Are they taking Ambien?

I surrender my crown to Rebecca, in Women of Internet Marketing – Special Edition

The Lisa takes a crack at SEO’s who dream of exploiting people in the name of marketing in Calling It Linkbait Doesn’t Make You Less of a Jerk

FreshEgg offers a peek into how a site audit includes both search engine marketing and usability in Haven Direct – The Start of a Journey

A detailed tutorial on DNS transfer is offered by Ron Carnell in How To Bypass Dns, You don’t have to wait for DNS propagation. (Topic inspired by Diane Vigil)

Silly love notes from children are the topic in David Temple’s 9 short notes kids wrote to their favorite seo. Can I get into trouble for mentioning “pole dancing” to Timmy?

Designing with a specific market in mind? Take them to Starbucks and ask a lot of questions. “Iamlost” writes about such an experience in A (revised) Facebook Campaign, or – the girls made me do it.

“Six young women met me at a Starbucks, four had niche interest, two did not. Within an hour they were texting and calling others. Over several hours a couple dozen women (plus a few tag-along boyfriends) gave me answers to questions unthought and questions to answers I’d thought complete. I am still sending back queries for elaboration and clarification.

They not only totally redesigned my FaceBook strategy but pointed out a second niche site I have worth marketing there. More value received in a few hours with them than the previous several weeks thinking for myself. Note to self: in future a pub would be cheaper.”

Which brings me to ponder…if you do eye tracking studies on users inside a Starbucks, what would the results be like?

Comments

Below is a list of the new features – I think the IsNull function and null keyword will prove to be quite handy.

• Multi-threaded programming (CFTHREAD, and related tags and functions)
• Interfaces and Abstract CFCs
• null keyword and IsNull() function
• CFQUERY Enhancements
• CACHEDUNTILCHANGE attribute
• BACKGROUND attribute
• Application.cfc
• onClientStart() handler
• onMissingTemplate() handler
• CFDOCUMENT
• CFCHART
• CFSEARCH Enhancements
• support for Word and PDF documents
• support for multiple languages
• UDF Forward References in CFML pages
• CFREGISTRY support for Windows registry
• ASP.NET Partial Trust Mode (BD.NET)
• support for MySQL 5.0, including stored procedures
• support for 64-bit Windows and Linux
• miscellaneous CFMX 7 compatible enhancements
• performance enhancements
• bug fixes

Comments

Related Entries

Null Java References in CF 6 vs 7 – January 10, 2006

CFDocs.org back up and running – April 21, 2006

Textile for ColdFusion – February 13, 2006

Use CFSILENT – February 7, 2006

DNS Query with ColdFusion – October 27, 2005

*View original post

Pete Freitag (http://www.petefreitag.com/) is a software engineer, and
web developer located in central new york. Pete specializes in the
HTTP protocol, web services, xml, java, and coldfusion. In 2003 Pete
published the ColdFusion MX Developers Cookbook with SAMs Publishing.

Pete owns a Firm called Foundeo (http://foundeo.com/) that specializes
in Web Consulting, and Products for Web Developers.

Introduction and scope

Almost Everyone who knows about the internet knows what a domain name is. It is what identifies a unique website or email server. When you send an email to someone@domain.com, the domain.com forms the domain name. When you type in http://domain.com in the address bar of your browser, the domain.com is the domain name of the website you are going to see.

But how does the computer know which page to show when there are almost infinite number of domain names possible ? How does it know where to fetch the webpage from ? This article answers these question and explains what you need to do to register and setup your domain and tell all the computers in the world that yourdomain.com should show your web page.

How to choose a domain name ?

There are many top level domains (TLDs) the most popular are the .com, .net and .org – Countries have their own like .us, .in, .ca, .au etc and then there is the new breed of domains like .tv, .info, .ws and so on but the most powerful king of all is the .com Why ? Because it came first ? In the domain market, single word domains sell for thousands of dollars and .com costs around 10 times more than the others and is as difficult to get a new name. There is a myth that domains with hypnens (dashes) are better for search engine rankings, I think there may be some truth in that myth, but domains without dashes always seem to cost more than the ones with dashes. The best way to register a domain is to determine the keywords you are going to target by using the free trial of keyword popularity and competition analysis from wordtracker.com and get a domain with those keywords in it. Another school of thought abandons this approach and advocates brand name domains like yahoo.com instead of everything-portal.com google.com instead of the-only-search-engine.com and ebay.com instead of online-junk-acutions.com – you get the picture.

Name Servers Explained

Every computer connected to the internet has an ip address that looks like 123.234.123.234

An ip address consists of 4 numbers separated by dots, each number ranging from 1 to 255. What this numbers mean is not important for us, all we need to understand is that each computer on the internet has a unique ip address and if the GoldenRobot wants to talk to R2D2 on the internet, it has to know the IP address of R2D2 (name borrowed from the movie Star Wars).

But Wait a minute, does that mean that there are only 256*256*256*256 number of computers that can connect to the internet, technically yes. But that number is large enough for now until they start connecting ever microwave and freezer to the internet (imagine your freezer automatically placing an order for 2 liters of milk to the grocery store when it detects that your milk stock is diminishing!)

OK, now you must be thinking all the ip address stuff is fine, but how does it relate to domain names ? Remember that I said “if the GoldenRobot wants to talk to R2D2, it has to know the IP address of R2D2 ” – but all you give to your computer is the Domain Name of the website you want to visit, so how can it get the ip address ? Enter the NameServer.

The job of a nameserver is to resolve a domain name to an ip address. Simple.

A nameserver is similar to a telephone directory except that instead of mapping person names to phone numbers, it maps domain names to ip addresses.

Imagine having just one telephone directory for all the people in the world ! In the same way, if they had just one nameserver for all domains, it would be unmanageably huge and all the computers would have to contact that one nameserver to get the domains resolved to ip addresses ! Even a super-duper-mega-monster-computer would not be able to handle such a load !

So we have many nameservers. When you register a domain, you specify which name server to use.

Now lets take our example

GoldenRobot wants to talk to R2D2

It will have to follow these steps

1> Look at the registrar entry for R2D2 to determine which nameserver to use

2> Connect to that nameserver and ask it for the ip address of R2D2

3> Connect to R2D2 using this IP address

In reality it is a bit more complicated due nameserver cacheing, and chained recursive lookups leading to authoritative and non authoritative responses but our example illustrates the basic concept and is sufficient knowledge to setup your domain.

One misconception that I would like to clarify, some people think that each domain name maps to a unique ip address, not true. Just as many people in a house can share a single telephone number, many domain names can share a single ip address. The NameServer will return the same ip address for all of these domains and when the browser connects to that ip address, it says I am trying to reach suchandsuch.com domain, the webserver then returns the correct page for the domain requested. Obtaining a unique ip address (known as dedicated ip) for your website is usually more expensive than sharing the ip address.

How to setup your domain name

Form the discussion we just had, you would be able to appreciate that in order for you to get your domain to point to your webpage, you need to do the following in theory

1> Obtain the ip address for the web host where your WebPages reside – this is the webserver ip

2> Make an entry (Called as DNS Entry) in a Nameserver to resolve your domain name to this ip address.

3> Configure your domain to use this nameserver

Most of the time, step 2 will be transparent to you as most webservers provide nameservers in which they make the DNS entry for you when you purchase webspace from them. Also, many good domain registrars provide their own nameservers that you can use.

While registering a domain or after registering a domain, you will need to set it up to use two or more nameservers. It is common to use multiple nameservers so that if one of them is down the others may be used.

You have three options to set the nameservers

Your webhost will usually have their own nameservers. In their documentation they may say you need to use something like ns1.yourwebhost.com and ns2.yourwebhost.com – If you use these, you need not bother about the webserver ip address or any other settings, just configure your domain to use these and you are all set.

If you use this option, you will need to know the ip address of your webserver (provided by your webhost). As you will be using the nameserver provided by your registrar, you will need to set it up to point to the correct ip address for your website by creating a DNS entry. The ip address for your webserver is called as the A record and the ip address for your mail server is called as the MX record, CNAME records are used if one domain needs to be similar to another domain, but you do not need to understand these options for a basic setup. Many top notch domain registrars in the industry provide advanced DNS management like forwarding your domain to another site, subdomains, email id management, wildcard dns etc

This is an option that very advanced domain managers prefer when they wish to have more features and greater control over their DNS records which may not be provided by the registrar or the webhost.
Now a days, the line between the web hosts and the domain registrars is fading as most domain registrars are providing web hosting and most web hosts are providing domain registration. If you purchase your domain registration and web hosting from the same company, chances are that you may never need to do any setup at all.

What to look for in a registrar

It is always a good idea to register your domain with a domain registration site rather than with your webhost so you can be able to shift your webhost in case you need to without loosing your domain.
A good domain registrar should provide you the following features

I use http://value-name.com for all my domain needs, they provide 1 year registration for $8.75 and $7.75 for a domain transfer including one year extension. They also have special prizing for bulk registrations.

Trouble Shooting Domain Name Problems

What can you do if you have trouble setting up your domain? First of all, remember that it may take up to 48 hours for your domain changes to propagate across the internet. If you wish to verify the settings on any domain, you can use our recommended whois tool

The whois report on any domain will tell you about the current nameservers attached to that domain in addition to the contact addresses, the registration date, expiry date and the date when the last modifications were made to that domain record. If the nameservers are not correct then you know you have to change them by logging into your domain name control panel or by contacting your registrar support. If the name servers that are shown are correct, then you can use the nslookup tool (Advanced DNS Lookup) from the same page to determine the ip address being returned for your domain by any nameserver. Here you should enter one of the nameserver that you find in the whois output and see what ip address it returns for your domain name.

If it does not return an ip address then the nameserver has to be configured to point your domain to the correct ip address, or you may be using the wrong nameserver.

If it returns an ip address, You can try typing the ip address directly into the address bar of your web browser, if it gives a 404 page not found error, then either the ip address is wrong or the webserver is down. If it returns some generic page but not your webpage, that is all right, this is to be expected unless you are using a dedicated ip address. Make sure that the IP address returned is the correct one that your web host is providing to you. If you are sure that the ip address is correct and still your website does not show when you type in your domain name in the address bar of your browser, then it may be that other people are able to access your site and only you are not able to access it because your local nameserver does not resolve your domain or resolves it wrongly. In that case, if you can find out the nameserver your local machine is using, you can enter that nameserver in the nslookup tool at and see what ip address it is returning. If your local nameserver is returning the wrong ip address all you need to do is wait till the dns changes propagate to your local nameserver, If your local nameserver is returning the right ip address, then you must contact your web host to inform them that their webserver is not configured to handle your domain.

Conclusion

We have covered a lot of ground here, from registering a domain to setting and trouble shooting it. Even if you never need to configure a domain, understanding the concepts behind what goes on behind the scenes when you type a domain name in your browser should make you feel good about yourself. And if you are one of those people who eat domains for breakfast, this article should give you a head start into the advanced configuration options available and with a little practice, you will be well on your way to become a Jedi Knight of domain management. May the force be with you, always.

Mufad
Join The Work at Home Community

http://biz-whiz.com

The beauty of DNS is in its transparency. Many people have heard of it, but few care to or need to know how it functions. Type a URL in your browser and, behind the scene, the browser queries the DNS to resolve the URL to an IP address. Same goes for sending emails, as the email server needs to locate the IP address of the server to forward messages to the correct recipients.

The Internet is a collection of computers, known as nodes, inter-connected around the world. In order for a node to become a part of the Internet it must have a legitimate address, known as an IP (Internet Protocol) address. Just like a postal address, an IP address is the means by which nodes can find and converse with each other. Nodes can be accessed through their IP addresses, but in order to bring the Internet to the masses, a system was devised to transform IP addresses to a human readable format. That is precisely what DNS does. It is used to assign names to IP addresses.

In the beginning the task of translating names to IP addresses was accomplished using hosts files. These were simple text files with sequential records of IP addresses and their corresponding names. As the Internet grew, it became apparent that maintaining these files was cumbersome and error-prone. DNS was devised to not only ease and formalize the translation job, but to also give such translation a more distributed nature.

Today hosts files are rarely used at localized levels and that is mainly for debugging purposes, but the real work of translating names to IP addresses is done via DNS.

Just about all computers connected to the Internet are assigned at least one DNS address to handle the job of translation, known as resolving names. If you have a Windows machine, you can find your DNS assignment using the “ipconfing/all” command. In Unix/Linux, the “resolv.conf” file contains the DNS information that is used to resolve names.

There are commands available allowing you to interact with DNS and make various queries. In Windows “nslookup” is the command that can be used to query DNS to resolve a name to an IP address. In Unix/Linux the equivalent command is “dig”. These commands however run in shell or command environments and are too esoteric for an average user to utilize. There is however a plethora of Web sites on the Internet that offer this service to users for free. Users can generally type in a node name and the site would query the DNS on their behalf and display the results.

Robert Vahid Hashemian, http://www.hashemian.com/ , is an
Internet and database programmer living in Connecticut,
USA. He is also the author of the book,
“Financial Markets For The Rest Of Us”. His Web site
contains a variety of Internet tools, including DNS
utilities at http://www.hashemian.com/tools/ .