LoudSpeakers

I use Dreamhost quite a bit for a variety of domain hosting.  I recently tried using it for DNS services for a custom domain name that I was using for a tumblr tumblog.

It didn’t work so well.  (the Dreamhost DNS part that is)

The idea itself is simple:  You create a CNAME DNS record pointing to the Tumblr IP address.  And then they handle it internally when requests come in.

The problem with Dreamhost is that it creates a number of CNAME records for domains that they are managing as part of your account.

Dreamhost allows you to create multiple CNAME records as expected, but doesn’t consistently work.  For some unknown reason, my CNAME record that pointed to tumblr’s IP address would occassionally resolve to what appeared to be an HTTP directory listing enabled site.  I mean, WTF? 

In any case, I forgot that DynDNS was the best solution.  I pointed my rajzilla.com’s nameservers to DynDNS (rather than through Dreamhost) and then created a CNAME record there that points to Tumblr and now it consistently works. 

You have to use the DynDNS custom domain service in order for this to work, but these guys have been super through the ~8 years that I have used their paid service.  And it’s cheap as hell.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 10:27 pm and is filed under Technology.