Web-Hosting

IPv6 Only Web Hosting

Saw this excellent presentation in UKNOF 34 by Peter Stevens from Mythic Beasts. Really enjoyed the challenges and fixes he shared in running an IPv6 only web hosting. A must watch for geeks :)  

Also, UKNOF & NLNOG both seem to have excellent content in their conferences along with professional video recording which they make available over YouTube channels.

IPv6 allocations to downwards machine with just one /64

IPv6 One of my friend went for a VM with a German hosting provider. He got single IPv4 (quite common) and a /64 IPv6. Overall /64 per VM/end server used to be ok till few years back but now these days running applications inside LXC containers (OS level virtualization) make more sense. This gives option to maintain separate hosting environment for each application. I personally do that a lot and infect blog which you are reading right now itself is on a LXC container.

Letsencrypt - Free signed automated SSL

Last year a really good project Letsencrypt came up. They key objective of this project is to help in securing web by pushing SSL everywhere.  

Two key cool features

  1. It offer free signed SSL certs!
  2. It helps in setting up SSL via an agent seamlessly without having to deal with CSR, getting it signed & updating web server configuration.

At this stage Letsencrypt is itself a Certificate Authority and but it’s root certs are yet not in the browser. It’s probably going to take a while till all major browsers get their certificate. To help on that one of it’s sponsors IdenTrust has signed their intermediate certs. Hence certs signed by Letsencrypt are accepted by all browsers right away. All certs signed by Letsencypt are signed by Letencrypt Authority X1 which have signature from DST Root CA X3 which is accepted by pretty much all popular browsers. You can read more about How it works here.   Here’s an example of SSL setup for say “demo.anuragbhatia.com” test domain which is already up and working without SSL. http://demo.anuragbhatia.com shows a plain text page. This is Apache running on Ubuntu server. The Apache web config is pretty straightforward.

Ubuntu 11.04 - additional mirror

And Ubuntu 11.04 released yesterday.

I will do a seperate blog post reviewing Ubuntu 11.04 specially the new Unity interface, but for now I am trying to help Linux community by additonal mirror.

Incase you are going to download Ubuntu - I would encourage you to use this mirror for Asian and European region.

http://server7.anuragbhatia.com/Ubuntu/11.04/release/

Update: Mirror has been removed as of now. author: “Anurag Bhatia” url: “/2011/04/web-hosting/ubuntu-11-04-additional-mirror/”

Keep spreading the Linux! :)

What to do when your email hosting is down?

This is a question that I have been asked many times via email and sometimes even phone! Situation is this: you wake up in the morning and found your email hosting is down. You are not getting any emails, either they are bouncing back or going to a blackhole. What should you do in such a situation? Email service is much like a chain – if any part is broken, you won’t get things working (apart from lots of frustration!). Since it’s like chain, one must follow step by step to find the problem.

More about SPF records

Few days back I visited Official Google Apps forum (one of my favorite places) and answered many questions. It was quite after some time i was there and found few cases/questions/problems as really interesting. Here’s one of the questions asked there by a admin named aol985 about SPF records.

His question:

As described in http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33786 , I set SPF record for mashfilm.ru domain to “v=spf1 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all”. But aspmx.googlemail.com currently does not resolves. Is it correct?

Setting up redirection

Most of people face issue in using Google sites is redirection……i,e www.domain.com works fine (becoz of presence of cname record) BUT domain.com fails here…… SO lets see the possible ways out to the issue:

  1. use redirection offered by Registrar (eNom, Godaddy, name.com etc…)
  2. use redirection offered by third party dns hosts. (only redirection and NOT dns hosting)

In this post, i will consider #2 as for #1 instructions are already available (Google for them!) and also i guess most of you people are reading this post because you were unable to do the #1! since we are using free services, they are perfect for blogger, small biz sites (having low traffic…i.e less then 10,000 visitors per day) We can use any of following host for setting redirection:

External DNS hosts...

So after answering lots of queries regarding Web Hosting setup, i thought to post about it here. This is regarding use of “External DNS Host…” Most of newbies get confused because of type of setup they want.

Type of DNS setups of site:

  1. Web host and dns host both are same…….i.e using web hosts name servers.
  2. Using separate DNS host and Web Host…

Both setups have their own advantages and dis-advantages…..like