Using the NetworkManager’s DNSMasq plugin

Fedora Magazine runs a handy article for anyone using work/corporate VPNs from a home computer – “Using the NetworkManager’s DNSMasq plugin“. This is also not the only use for the DNSMasq plugin. It comes in useful when you work local cluster setups for development or testing. Furthermore, pretty much any setup where you need to route DNS queries to different servers, this can either be used out of the box, or provide good ideas as to how to solve the problem.

How Many .com Domain Names Are Unused?

Here’s an interesting study of the .com domain names. It appears that only about 1/3 of the registered domains are in use by legitimate websites. The rest are either spam, email-only, empty, broken, etc.

Only about 100,000 domains were crawled to provide a representative sample. But to me, the numbers look quite realistic. If only, I would push the porn and gambling sites into the “in use” category, rather than have them separately.

Domain names and web hosting research


Web Hosting Geeks published a very extensive research into domain names and web hosting provider options.  It includes the analysis of domain name trends by TLD, as well as over 24,000 hosting companies and how they are doing.

Complete with reviews, and detailed stats about each and every company, I think, this is one of the most complete and in-depth data I’ve seen for a long time.




Automattic and .blog domains


I was very excited when six years ago Automattic, the company behind WordPress, became a domain registrar.  Registering, renewing, and managing domains is still a painful process today as much as it was six years ago.

So, what have the company decided to do with its new super power? Well, they’ve integrated domain registration with their WordPress.com hosted blogging service.  And now they are promoting the new .blog domains:

Millions of short, easy to remember domains will be available when the .blog domain goes live November 21. Apply now to secure the perfect domain for your blog.

This sounds cool, until you check the prices.

leonid.blog

30 EUR per year is not cheap.  But an additional 220 EUR early application fee on top of it makes it a no deal for me.  I wonder how many bloggers out there will go for this.

I understand that managing a top level domain is not an easy thing to do.  Everything from infrastructure to technical support costs money.  But at those prices, I think I’ll wait until the technology gets cheaper.  Because it inevitably will.




DNS / Whois Record Lookup Tool


Here is yet another DNS / WHOIS record lookup tool.  It’s quick and simple – just type the website’s URL and submit a form.  You’ll get a result with all the DNS records and WHOIS information, all on one page.

The term DNS stands for Domain Name System, the largest digital database which contains all websites information on the internet. Every domain has authoritative DNS server which publishes information about that domain and the name server for the domain.

Our DNS / Whois record lookup tool will grab A, MX, SOA, NS, TXT and Whois records for a domain name.