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Have you tried switching to GraniteCanyon to serve your DNS records? Doesn't matter who your registrar is -- just change your nameservers to a proper DNS provider like GraniteCanyon and you can add any valid RR, including a TXT record. See http://soa.granitecanyon.com/.

SPF is useful _now_ - I've not been 'joe jobbed' (i.e. someone "borrowing" my domain in forged From: headers since adding SPF). It also makes it much easier to get your mail delivered to AOL users (I have one domain which does have a mailing list for non-technical users - until the SPF record was added, AOL was problematical). Just avoiding being 'joe jobbed' is worth it - it's not nice to get 40,000 bounce messages when someone forged their From: address using your email address.

Here's a couple:

http://soa.granitecanyon.com/

There are more out there with a bit of googling.

I've been using granitecanyon for my DNS for years and had absolutely no problems at all. Free is a pretty good price too since you don't need banners or anything ;) The only issue is the turnaround time for the automated system to make DNS changes. No biggie for a home operation though. Link here

11. Where can I get unlimited free DNS?
Granite Canyon is the most well known free DNS provider. They will provide DNS, free of cost, for as many domains as you have. They are a little harder to use, and their servers aren't quite as reliable, but they are a great, completely free DNS solution.

...

Yeah I know, they're also suggesting that the free service is not as good, and hoping you'll come back.

Two very good public DNS services that will act as secondary for you:

• http://www.granitecanyon.com/
• http://www.everydns.net/

They'll also act as primary, dynamic, etc. Both free, but of course they take donations! :)

Imagine how this might increase AOL's or hotmail's network traffic, while they gain nothing from it.

Well, they do gain, actually -- if the plan works, it will blot out quite a lot of spam. AOL and Hotmail spend an astronomical amount of money dealing with spam in the current situation (it doesn't help that lots of spammers forge AOL or hotmail return addresses... I'm sure those bounces crank out the bandwidth required). If they need to pay for more bandwidth and more servers to support SPF, I have to imagine that will be much cheaper than the manpower they have to support to fight the problem now.

Besides, how much extra bandwidth is really involved? Wouldn't it work like other DNS records, and be cached all over the place?

I don't know enough about the technology to properly address your second point... but I think because we're dealing with DNS servers here (instead of needing to contact the mail servers) this may actually work out. Sure, some people run mail servers from home, etc., but DNS is usually provided free by an ISP; there are also free DNS hosts.

Either way, I'm rooting for it. Spam is killing email.

At home, I've got normal consumer-grade (Time Warner; somewhere around 3mbps/384kbps, $50) cable. The service is dead-solid reliable, and the IP address has never changed.

Oh, sure - it *might*. But dynamic DNS services are easy to set up, and free.

And if you insist on running BIND yourself, there's ways of doing that, too, without bothering your registrar every time you hop IPs or costing you a cent.

Once you've got the DNS issues resolved, the rest (SMTP, HTTP, whatever) is cake.

(If this all seems too "hard" or "unreliable" or "hackish," please feel free to contribute $50/mo to your existing ISP for a static address. Thank you.)

if you force me to tweek my DNS records (my ISP charges per change - yeah i know i should just run my own copy of BIND, but i don't want to worry about the uptime of a pair of DNS servers) i shall be forced to send you the bill :P

So, use Granite Canyon.

-jerdenn

But most people don't have DNS on their home computers.

If a computer needs to be addressed, it can and should have a name in the DNS. Getting a DNS entry for your computer is trivially easy even if you don't have your own domain. There are only two reasons for not bothering to set up a name: either the machine doesn't commonly need to be addressed (because it runs no servers), or you actually prefer to type the IP address, and can remember it easily. The fact that IPv6 addresses aren't often easy to remember is just all the more reason to set up a name.

There is plenty of public DNS servers. Just type WHOIS domainname on any *nix box and your get the DNS for that domain. Use that.
Pick MS or some other outfit even ATT.com might be good. If you need your own DNS server get one for free here

At this point, I wouldn't consider doing anything without checking with Nominum (the company responsible for writing and maintaining BIND version 9).

These guys offer a service whereby they provide either primary or secondary nameservice for your domain, across their distributed cluster of redundant, fault-tolerant servers. Heck, the secondary service is even free (in all the various senses of the word).

I just wish they had a Dynamic DNS service, so that we could all kiss DynDNS.org and GraniteCanyon.com farewell for their incredibly crappy service.
--
Brad Knowles

My mistake, not a full server. Just a cheapo host.

Still, a vhost can be relatively inexpensive. My ISP sells its services a la carte, and charges me $15 a month to host my web site. They also charge a fee to handle DNS, but they'll let you handle your own, which I do. Even without a static IP, a service like Granite Canyon's Public DNS Service will let you control the DNS records for your domain.

Owning and operating your own domain does not have to be prohibitively expensive.

To try it out, I put a .hom record on granitecanyon and told my local nameserver to forward all "hom" requests to their nameserver. `nslookup` picked up my new entry no problem and still gets all the .com's the old way just as it has before. I also read the ".hom" site with my browser just to make sure.

Of course, people have to consciously act to be able to access these domains, but we have to start somewhere. With enough momentum, the Linux distributions might pick up the lines in their config files.

For the simple details of how I did this and some suggestions for how to regulate these spaces see this page.

Note: I don't necessarily suggest we use granitecanyon specifically, or that we don't at least consult with their admins first.

People mention Freenet, but Freenet only protects information that is there. You've got to make sure that if police or military forces comes bursting in one night, information must be stored where they can't close it down and distributed from there.

Also, it is important that people who support a site don't use too much bandwidth and HD space before it gets serious. Othervice, people may not be able give the necessary resources.

What I have in mind is a network where those providing endagered resources can call for support (CFS). Those who respond to the CFS set up a software to download an image of the site every now and then (say once a month, once a week or something), and at least after controversial information has been published.

Next, we need something that sets off an alarm that the endagered site is being attacked. This has to include the possibility that the site just goes down without warning (military forces shoot the webmaster and blows everything to pieces, to take an extreme). This could be done by checking every now and then if the server is up, and if it stays down for any extended period of time, the alarm would go off. Naturally, there must not be too many false alarms, or the system will loose credibility. This pretty much rules out Windows as platform.... :-) Also, it should be possible for the administrator to set off the alarm by a single command, so that if somebody comes bursting in, they have to act fast to stop the information from being transmitted. Other features such as the administrator saying "if my site goes down at 12:15 and you don't hear from me, we're under attack". Also, intelligence might try to fool the system to mirror useless or bogus information, we would have to work hard to make sure we are one step ahead.

If a site is under attack, there are a number of things that could be done. First, put up a mirror of any information that you have stored, dump it on Freenet. Maybe some sort of system could be set up so that nameservers are updated with information about one of the mirrors, so that the web site has very little downtime? Perhaps a global network of name servers similar to the two provided by Granite Canyon's Public DNS service, where authority can be transfered as part of an alarm. One can also attempt to keep e-mail working as well, but that's of little use if the admin has been shot.... If the alarm has been set off by the admin, one should try to download a mirror as a part of the alarm response to get the latest.

I have also been thinking about how to use the internet to try to keep those suppressed online using minimalist solutions, e.g. TCP/IP over ham radio. It might have low bandwidth, but perhaps sufficient for e-mails...?

Alternatively there is a page somewhere where people get together and swap secondaries, to get round that. Think it is probably linked from the granite canyon page somewhere...

No guarantees about anything... Also, I'm not convinced that a roll-your-own solution will really give you better uptime, unless you have a lot of time to devote to fixing an outage... it certainly lets you know as much as anyone about WHY it's down...

The Public DNS is useful if you:

• Can't get free service from an ISP and don't want to do it yourself
• Need secondary DNS servers
• Need MX records for a virtual domain
• Want control over your DNS records: change DNS frequently, changing ISPs soon
• Are inside of a firewall and need publicly-accessible name servers outside of your firewall
• Need name servers that are closer to the North American Internet backbones

All my internal boxes (including a roommates win98 machine) are masqueraded through my LRP router. I forward ssh, http/https, and smtp to an internal box, so my web server is publicly accessible, and I can receive my own mail (I use Qmail).

I also used the Public DNS service to provide forward DNS for 0xd6.org, which goes to my network at home. One bad thing about Telocity is that because they're swamped with tech support, etc., they won't delagate reverse DNS. For my simple home setup, I don't care.

This setup has been up and running for the last few months, I have also assisted a friend and my mother in getting this going. All you need is Telocity and a cheap 486 with two NICs and you're ready to go.

About telocity:
It took about a month from ordering Telocity to having our service installed. My friend and mother's installation went fine but I had a few minor quirks which were easily solved by Telocity (i.e. they knew what the problem was and fixed it themselves). As I mentioned before, Telocity's one true failing is technical support. Be prepared to spend hours waiting to get a human, this is due to the fact that Telocity has many users in many cities. But as for running your own network, Telocity doesn't care what you do as long as you don't do anything commercial. In fact, we were told that our service was limited to 768k down/384k up, but in actuality Telocity doesn't limit up (I've gotten 768k consistently) and they're rate-limiting software doesn't work as well as they thought, because I've gotten over 900k downloading before my speeds started dropping. The moral of this story is: get telocity and go nuts with your setup. Make sure that you protect your network.

Marcus

I registered sparkyb.net for $15/year from doster.com. They were great and easy. You are on your own as far as DNS but I got Public DNS to work after a week of playing (www.granitecanyon.com). Doster has now raised their rates to $25/year. I'm glad I registered for 5 years in advance.

I've also been using GraniteCanyon, a free service, as my DNS provider.

Everything seems fine so far. I've had my domain for a month or so with no problems.

Sort of. You pay them some money and tell them the IP address(es) of one or more DNS server which serves your domain. Some registrars (register.com, for example) and many ISPs provide a DNS service, usually at an extra but nominal fee, or if you're willing to learn how to set up domain records yourself, you can go to free DNS services such as Granite Canyon, whom I use to serve the nameserver records for trikuare.cx (mostly since I need the flexibility of maintaining the DNS myself, since I have a bunch of different systems I keep under this domain, some of which are dynamic, some of which aren't, and I've also got my mail exchanging handled by a friend of mine, who is separate than the friend who runs the webserver which my homepage is on, etc.etc.etc.)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

The Public DNS Service seem very cool.
This isn't related either, but DynoDNS will give you yourname.dynodns.net for a dynamic IP. updatable with a web page or various clients you can put in your ip-up script.

If anyone is looking to grab a few domains, but is not ready to commit to a host/dns provider yet, I suggest you check out soa.granitecanyon.com.

They let you create your own A, CNAME, and MX records, so you can register through any registrar you want, and if you're without DNS, have them point at the granitecanyon set up for DNS resolution. This has saved me many a time.

Well register.com sponsors granitecanyon.com, the public dns people. But is dependent upon the referals that granitecanyon makes to register.com.

So if you want to help out granitecanyon, just hop on over to soa.granitecanyon.com then click over to register.com and register your domain.

Register.com offers a very nice interface. But they are a bit pricy.

Personally I now use totalnic.net They offer great service. With no frils. Nice web based interface for changing DNS information. Althouh they are plaiged with the trouble that CoreNIC has...

Overall for now TotalNIC is in my opinion your best bet due to the cheap pricing.

Well good luck

I'm also running through this kind of questions right now. I want to setup my web, mail, ftp, etc. server at home with a domain name, and I've got some difficulties figuring this all out.

As far as I know, DNS servers "worldwide" use a cache system, which is refreshed only once every 24 hours or so, so if you have a dynamic IP address... your domain (mail, web, etc.) might be unavailable for as long as 24 hours every time your IP is changed. If you have a static IP but no DNS you can use www.granitecanyon.com which provide free DNS.

For the time being I will try to use domainforwarding, which handle all the DNS stuff for you and redirect any request (http and mail) to addresses you specify (e.g. www.isp.com/~user, user2399@hotmail.com, etc.).

If anybody knows how to do a setup using free DNS + static IP (cable or DSL modem), let us know!

Final note: if you only want to "reserve" a domain name, I think (but I'm not sure?) you still must have DNS servers. It is called "parking" a domain name, some companies offer this service.

This is not about hosting, but about free domain names.
Cx's registrants can still make their DNS point to sourceforge.net if they want. Free DNS services are available from different sites (like Granite Canyon for example,) so opensource webmasters don't even have to pay for that either.

Not quite, the correct address is GraniteCanyon.Com

They offer perl, php3, mysql, shopping cart, secure server, pop, ftp, majordomo, telnet and 350 mb webspace. (+frontpage for dummies)

And the fee you pay is for life.... I'm paying now 2/3 of their current rate actually.
Ok, it's still pricy, but on company level it's a small cost to make.....

BTW: I use mydomain.com for aditional domains (mx records) and granitecanyon.com for secondary dns. My uptime is 99.998%

my $0.02

There is nothing wrong with register.com, they are top notch. For the same price as NSI, they also will provide you with Nameservers, a web interface for changing most of your information and and the tech support.... I've never seen a better tech support staff. You email them and they get back within 3 hours, any time day or night. If you want to change something at 3am, send an email and it'll be changed by the time you wake up. Once I even recieve a personal call to make sure everything was ok. (It was a particularly drawn out q&a back and forth between me and them.) PLUS, they sponsor The Granite Canyon Project, which provides free DNS Services. That's the reason I went with them to begin with, but they won me over with their service.

There's a sponsorship agreement between The Public DNS Service and register.com. If you're going to use register.com and might use the Public DNS Service, follow one of the links from the Public DNS Service to register.com so they get credit (and hopefully money) for the referral.

NSI Closes Top Level Domain Servers

NSI challenged over "obscene" domains

NSI Modifies "whois" agreement

Other related "alternative" DNS and related resources which I have seen mentioned here on /. or elsewhere: Not the European Union: eu.org (free domain names), The Internet Namespace Cooperative (provides alternative to mainstream root servers), The .us domain (an often overlooked alternative for those in the united states), Granite Canyon (free primary/secondary DNS). eu.org recently got very efficient and cleared a backlog of domains; Granite Canyon has had a lot of complaints about spotty service.

Suggested other readings: In whose domain, Exclusion and Coordination in Cyberspace, for the advanced user; Ask Mr. DNS and the FAQ for comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains.