Free DNS: Moved from geoscaling to cloudfare

Hopefully the shortest post yet :)

I was previously using GeoScaling (http://www.geoscaling.com/) to provide DNS for my domain names but they’ve had a few 24hr+ outages in the last year and this has caused havoc with (mainly with my e-mail as sending servers have been unable to resolve/deliver mail to my domain).

I anticipated it was time to cough up some cash for a professional, paid for service with guaranteed uptime, but stumbled across another free option- CloudFare (http://www.cloudflare.com). The switch was pretty seamless and (to the best of my knowledge) they’ve had no downtime since I migrated. They have a much larger infrastructure (presumably due to the paid for services they also offer) and even the free services supports a CDN style caching if you wish to save your webserver’s bandwidth.

Configuring DNS for Office365 / Lync

I recently dropped my web hosting provider in favour of hosting my site at home (I already have the server infrastructure, and now I have a fairly reliable 80/20 internet service). However, I was not yet ready to host my own nameserver / DNS. So I went hunting for a free service. It took some time but eventually I found http://www.geoscaling.com

I got my A records, CNAME records and MX record configured with ease but couldn’t quite figure out the SRV records (I was trying to enter the port into the ttl/priority boxes, which looked ok in the records table but didn’t seem to function properly). I was able to check using NSLOOKUP.

Open a command prompt and type

nslookup
set type=all
_sip._tls.domain.tld

You should then see an answer as below:

If the SRV record isn’t configured correctly you will see a message: Non-existent domain as above.

Here is a screenshot of how you correctly enter the SRV record in the geoscaling web interface: