dns

Many of you have been asking for months when my Route 53 course would release. Well, it’s finally here! AWS Networking Deep Dive: Route 53 DNS is now available on Pluralsight. Topics covered include: Configuring Route 53 to work with any domain name, even one registered with a different registrar DNS concepts and how Route 53 fits in with the internet’s domain name system Creating public hosted zones, health checks, and routing policies Using private hosted zones with multiple VPCs  

You probably know the popular Google DNS server IP addresses by heart: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. Before those were around you might have even used Level3’s 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2. Of course, everyone else uses these too, which means these popular servers are under a pretty heavy load. Fortunately, there are faster public DNS servers out there. Much faster. 101 DNS Servers I’ve compiled a list of 101 public DNS servers (PDF), sorted in order of fastest to slowest (for me).

Security usually requires sacrificing convenience (or money). So naturally, we tend to get away with as little security as possible. But if you’re a glutton for punishment, here are 4 very inconvenient but highly effective measures you can take right now to protect yourself from the evils lurking on the interwebs. Disable JavaScript Yeah, I know. Every site made since the Web 2.0 days needs JavaScript just for a text input field to work right.

How to Configure Server Core with Active Directory Services, DNS, and DHCP Using Nothing But PowerShell

Windows Server 2012 offers two installation options: Server Core or “Server with a GUI”. This begs the question: Why would you want to install Server Core instead of the GUI? One reason may be that you have limited physical hardware resources and want to keep the footprint as small as possible.

Recently I needed to build a domain controller, DHCP, and DNS server for a branch office. This office has a Riverbed Steelhead WAN optimization appliance which runs a nested VMware ESXi hypervisor. The appliance has limited memory and disk space, so I needed to keep the installation as small as possible (Incidentally, if I only needed DNS and DHCP, I would have just installed RedHat Enterprise Linux, but having the server be an Active Directory domain controller was also a requirement.)

I’m going to show you step-by-step how I configured Active Directory Services, DNS, and DHCP on a Windows Server 2012 Server Core installation.

I ran into a little snag when executing some XenApp PowerShell commands. Certain commands like Get-XAFarm and Get-XAAdministrator would always give an “0x80060016” error. Here is an example and the fix: `PS C:\Windows\system32> Get-XAFarm Get-XAFarm : Error reading the current administrator data (0x80060016) At line:1 char:11 Get-XAFarm «« CategoryInfo : InvalidResult: (:) [Get-XAFarm], CitrixException FullyQualifiedErrorId : GetCitrixAdminType,Citrix.XenApp.Commands.GetFarmCmdlet` Typically this error code in Citrix indicates a problem with IMA.