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Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

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Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#141

Post by falcolas »

djsumdog wrote: post #48
isclever wrote: post #40

My takeaway: 1. Setup up monitoring on your critical domains. UptimeRobot and Hetrixtools are good starters with generous free tier. You should know when your website/email/dns isn't working. 2. Don't tie your domain registration with your DNS provider. You lose everything if something goes wrong with your account. 3. Be able to jump ship easily, have backups of your zone, already know where you will transfer to.

> UptimeRobot and Hetrixtools are good starters with generous free tier Are there any open source status pages/monitor programs that have build-in checks for HTTPS, DNS records (ipv4/6), arbitrary port checks, etc? I'd rather just setup a status page/alert app on a $5 minimal DO/Vultr node and self-host/support/contribute to a FOSS program than use a commercial provider.

Nagios. Or its descendant with a better configuration language, Icinga2. They're fairly easy to do a minimal install and configure in a container or on a VM.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#142

Post by andrewstuart »

mpitt wrote: post #133
andrewstuart wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've put this idea forward a number of times here on HN in regards to other big tech companies. Technology companies need an "ombudsman" - a contact that customers can go to when the normal tech support processes have failed. The Ombudsman must not be part of the technology companies ordinary support processes, it must be entirely separate, and have highest level authority to demand action within the company. To avoi…

jgc is not a "random" Cloudflare person ;)

My point is precisely that to me, "jgc" IS a random person. How the heck do I know who this person is.

It shouldn't matter, and it should not be required, that someone "known and important" within an organisation decides to start doing hands on tech support in social media following a PR disaster.

If "jgc" is actually someone important within this company then maybe after fixing this issue, they can then go fiox their tech support by setting up and ombudsman and get their PR disasters off the front page of HN.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#144

Post by acangiano »

subhro wrote: post #127
andrewstuart wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've put this idea forward a number of times here on HN in regards to other big tech companies. Technology companies need an "ombudsman" - a contact that customers can go to when the normal tech support processes have failed. The Ombudsman must not be part of the technology companies ordinary support processes, it must be entirely separate, and have highest level authority to demand action within the company. To avoi…

This is a really nice idea. This already exists for some companies in the form of Twitter accounts. I doubt the people doing the typee-typee actually has any authority over business processes, or demand a change, but I think they at least have the business owners on their speed dial, vs normal support tickets. But having an email is far better.

Amusingly, Twitter itself could use one. My account (@acangiano) has all of its images censored under "sensitive content" even though they are 100% benign images. No amount of tweets to @TwitterSupport has done anything at all to change it. There is basically no recourse. My account is like 12 years old and has 4.5K followers, so it's not like it's a random spam account, either. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#145

Post by falcolas »

unilynx wrote: post #81
iudqnolq wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want email or text message alerts I would assume that's a complicated enough system you would want uptime alerts on it, and so on recursively ad infinitum.

If you can set up nagios (which one would probably consider an interesting evening challenge if you were already willing to go for your own monitoring droplet) setting up pushover or amazon sns (for sms) should be easy enough.

FWIW, a lot of cellular providers have an email gateway for delivering SMS messages. There's also paid SMS gateways, and options for providing arbitrary push notifications to smartphones.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#146

Post by iudqnolq »

gist wrote: post #136
andrewstuart wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've put this idea forward a number of times here on HN in regards to other big tech companies. Technology companies need an "ombudsman" - a contact that customers can go to when the normal tech support processes have failed. The Ombudsman must not be part of the technology companies ordinary support processes, it must be entirely separate, and have highest level authority to demand action within the company. To avoi…

> Technology companies need an "ombudsman" - a contact that customers can go to when the normal tech support processes have failed. From what I read this is nothing to indicate the process failed (so far) just that the user decided to skip to the head of the line by writing a blog post internet style to get something resolved and attention. Failed is not 'I didn't get a reply or find what I needed as quickly as I thi…

The core of what you say is correct. I posted about this publicly with two goals in mind: getting help from someone at cloudflare and getting advice on how to avoid this sort of issue from the HN community.

From my perspective Cloudflare's process did fail. Assuming I didn't do something insanely dumb and what I think happened did happen, I would consider that a failure on its own even if the support was perfect afterwards.

Copying from elsewhere:

I address this in TFA.

Essentially I felt that this was alright because when I filed a ticket I was informed that I should expect a long wait and that they recommend that their non-business customers post publicly on their support forum for crowdsourced support because that leads to faster replies. I was unable to log into that forum, and I suspect that may be because the way they set up SSO between the forum login and their main login may have failed in Firefox (with all tracking prevention and ad blockers disabled).

I felt that if a company invites me to ask for support publicly on their forum to save on customer support costs it's reasonable to talk about the issue in another public place.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#147

Post by melq »

iudqnolq wrote: post #114
jgrahamc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked for Cloudflare since it was 24 people. I care a hell of a lot about our customers. I know eastdakota does also.

I can tell. Cloudflare has been a delight to use up to now and I'm grateful I'm getting this kind of support when I've only used your loss-leader services.

This is probably obvious but you're getting this kind of support because they're getting terrible PR by virtue of your post being at the top of HN. Not because he's such a great guy that cares so much about the customers. Not saying he isn't a great guy, or that anyone at cloudflare actually wanted this to be your experience.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#148

Post by BenjiWiebe »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #105
iudqnolq wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. Looks like I'll just have to pay more. Any recommendations for a registrar?

Hurricane Electric has a pretty solid free DNS offering. I've been using it for like 10 years. https://dns.he.net/ I haven't needed to talk to them much, but one time I tried to add a .ninja domain, and there backend wouldn't handle it. I emailed them to report the problem at 4:49 p.m. I got an email at 7:09 p.m. the same day (2 hours 20 minutes later later) asking me to try adding it again. [1] When a free service f…

+1 for Hurricane Electric. Right now I'm giving CloudFlare's DNS a try, but HE gave me solid service (including dynamic DNS) for years.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#149

Post by isclever »

djsumdog wrote: post #48
isclever wrote: post #40

My takeaway: 1. Setup up monitoring on your critical domains. UptimeRobot and Hetrixtools are good starters with generous free tier. You should know when your website/email/dns isn't working. 2. Don't tie your domain registration with your DNS provider. You lose everything if something goes wrong with your account. 3. Be able to jump ship easily, have backups of your zone, already know where you will transfer to.

> UptimeRobot and Hetrixtools are good starters with generous free tier Are there any open source status pages/monitor programs that have build-in checks for HTTPS, DNS records (ipv4/6), arbitrary port checks, etc? I'd rather just setup a status page/alert app on a $5 minimal DO/Vultr node and self-host/support/contribute to a FOSS program than use a commercial provider.

Here is a good list: https://github.com/n1trux/awesome-sysadmin#monitoring

Maybe one fits what you are looking for.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#150

Post by teddyh »

throwawaydns101 wrote: post #42
Legogris wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked into self-hosting DNS and it doesn't seem like that big of a deal as long as you can ensure uptime to be honest. If you set up the two first on different hosts and possibly have #3/4 being cloud providers I think you're pretty good. Does anyone here have experience with running their own DNS servers for their domains?

That would solve the problem of losing DNS records. What do you do when you lose access to the domain name in the first place?

The main problem which people seem to have is that their domain name registrar decides to pull their domain. Luckily, there is ample competition in this space, my place of employment included, which should make it reasonable to pick a place which 1. doesn’t do that and 2. has reasonable real-live-person support.

Of course, if the registry (i.e. the TLD) wants your domain gone, you are out of luck whatever you do. If this is a concern then you should pick a TLD with what you consider reasonable management. There are a lot of ccTLDs and gTLDs to choose from.

Therefore, what you absolutely shouldn’t do is to pick whatever domain registrar is either cheapest or largest, and pick whatever domain name which happens to look cool and be available. Both are recipies for potential disaster.

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