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Tell HN: Please update your DNS records when abandoning servers

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Re: Tell HN: Please update your DNS records when abandoning servers

#61

Post by tatersolid »

Triv888 wrote: post #21
axegon_ wrote: post #18

I agree, but there's something related which I feel is very weird and I wonder if I'm the rule or the exception: I have close to 100 domains to my name(for relatable reasons, i.e. "hey I have a wix site can you please add a domain to it, idk how") in addition to a dozen servers. Some of those domains are completely unused but could be pretty valuable to some people. No one has ever contacted me about either one of th…

I only had about 5 domains and two different Chinese people contacted me about buying 2 of them (4-letter domains)... I sold one for a couple of hundreds.

That seems really low unless the domains were nonsense random letters.

I sold a 4-letter “acronym” .com (acquired in a merger) on behalf my employer about 5 years ago for a few hundred thousand USD.

Re: Tell HN: Please update your DNS records when abandoning servers

#62

Post by dheera »

mistrial9 wrote: post #52
dheera wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although in OP's case someone wanted to buy the domain, so maybe don't update your DNS records, in case your subdomain becomes worth a lot of cash? I mean hell, create a bunch of random bogus A records too just in case any of them wins the lottery ticket. A records are free, after all.

Is an open commons to be treated like this by civilized people? Why throw garbage in the streets? It makes no sense or else is motivated by reaction and negativity. It seems either desperate, or hostile, or so casual as to be literally stupid.

I see I have it backwards as another comment noted.

Why is it hostile though? A records are under your own domain. Creating a bunch of bogus A records for sale is the digital equivalent of a garage sale on your front lawn. You're not actually squatting any TLDs, which would be the digital equivalent of a real estate ghost town.

Re: Tell HN: Please update your DNS records when abandoning servers

#63

Post by icedchai »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #16
susam wrote: post #12

While domain registrants should certainly be careful that their DNS records point to trusted servers only and should definitely remove any stale DNS entries, we should also configure our web-servers to return successful response for specific hostnames only and error/no response for everything else. Here is roughly how the configuration for, say, https://example.com/ , would look like: sudo mkdir /etc/nginx/ssl sudo o…

You can't: the web server has to accept the connection to know the hostname. The best you can do is close the connection immediately without sending a response if it's an unknown hostname. I believe that at least with Apache and nginx doing this requires using a non-default module.

I think you are over complicating things. You just need a default virtual host that displays a "domain not configured" page. This is what we did when I ran a hosting company.

Re: Tell HN: Please update your DNS records when abandoning servers

#64

Post by HowTheStoryEnds »

cddotdotslash wrote: post #40

This is a common issue in AWS too. User sets up a Route53 entry pointed at an S3 bucket, then later deletes the bucket but not the domain. Someone else then creates the same bucket again in their account (bucket names are globally reserved) and suddenly they can host content on a domain they don't own.

How can they know the name of the original bucket? Can the route53 entry be queried?

Re: Tell HN: Please update your DNS records when abandoning servers

#65

Post by Triv888 »

tatersolid wrote: post #61
Triv888 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only had about 5 domains and two different Chinese people contacted me about buying 2 of them (4-letter domains)... I sold one for a couple of hundreds.

That seems really low unless the domains were nonsense random letters. I sold a 4-letter “acronym” .com (acquired in a merger) on behalf my employer about 5 years ago for a few hundred thousand USD.

Yes it was random letters, and the domain isn't in used yet (and that was years ago)... I guess you got lucky that your random letters became/were an acronym.

Re: Tell HN: Please update your DNS records when abandoning servers

#66

Post by mtnGoat »

dstick wrote: post #33
mtnGoat wrote: post #30

I once inherited an ip block the previous owner never pointed his SEO network domains away from. I setup a wildcard, captured all the traffic and made good coin for quite a while.

Care to share how exactly you earned from that? :) SEO Network domains (or link blogs) are usually built for Google crawlers, not actual human eyeballs. They don’t rank high, they boost the rank of other sites.

Adult content(before and after), and it was about ten years ago. Odd part was, the owner renewed some of the domains, so I got this income for two years.

Re: Tell HN: Please update your DNS records when abandoning servers

#67

Post by Denvercoder9 »

icedchai wrote: post #63
Denvercoder9 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't: the web server has to accept the connection to know the hostname. The best you can do is close the connection immediately without sending a response if it's an unknown hostname. I believe that at least with Apache and nginx doing this requires using a non-default module.

I think you are over complicating things. You just need a default virtual host that displays a "domain not configured" page. This is what we did when I ran a hosting company.

The parent comment originally said "just don't accept HTTP connections for unknown hostnames".
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