Obviously none of this should surprise me since I literally built an outbound SMTP relaying service to allow people to get around exactly this kind of restrictions <checks notes> in 2003: web.archive.org/web/20050207034721/http:... […]
A photo of a cluttered server room. In the center, a black metal rack holds several pieces of computer equipment, including a monitor, servers, and routers, with a tangle of wires hanging from it. To the right is an orange stepladder. A few cardboard boxes are on the floor. The walls are white and the floor is gray carpet.
Today in #DynDNSHistory , the networking / server room of our first Manchester NH office.
It was still pretty messy at this point, as we were still moving in. I'm not sure if it ever got CLEAN, at least not while I was in the picture. I'm not good at being […]
[Original post on union.place]
Foreground: two white men and a white woman, man on the far right is wearing a "Will work for bandwidth :)" t-shirt, other man (middle) and woman (left) are both wearing Hawaiian/tropical style print shirts. The people are standing in front of the Arecibo Observatory's moving gantry and receiver mechanism in the background, with lush forest around.
OMG I can't believe I haven't posted this one to #DynDNSHistory before. This is my ultimate geek cred photo: me, with Larry Wall (creator of #Perl) and his wife Gloria (I'm super embarrassed to admit I just had to look that up). At Arecibo Observatory.
2002, Perl Whirl, #StartupLife
Secondary bonus: #DynDNSHistory fodder and generalized enjoyment.
Tertiary bonus: finding random garbage that I can delete and save storage space.
A messy corner office featuring an L-shaped wooden desk and a tall, black leather chair with chrome accents. The desk holds a cluttered arrangement of dual computer monitors, a laptop, and various office supplies. On the floor, there's a black briefcase and several cardboard boxes.
It's back, more #DynDNSHistory !
Looking back through photos, here's a gem from our first "real real" office in Manchester, NH. I recall being so excited to move from CRT to LCD monitors - look at the massive bezels on those things! 2004 was such a different […]
[Original post on union.place]
An aerial shot captures a large, sprawling commercial or industrial complex. The main building, centrally located, has a lighter-colored roof in its front section with many parallel, light grey lines, likely skylights or solar panels. Behind this lighter section, the roof darkens and appears to have numerous HVAC units and other equipment. To the far right, another dark-roofed section of the building has several rectangular cutouts or courtyards. The building is surrounded by extensive asphalt parking lots, some appearing empty while others show parked vehicles, particularly in the upper right corner. Curved roads and green spaces with trees and some bare patches of ground, indicative of winter or early spring, frame the complex.
Name that datacenter.
(Not the same datacenter as Name that loading dock.)
#DynDNSHistory
An aerial view shows several buildings and a parking lot. In the center, a long, dark-roofed building with a slightly angled roof extends horizontally, with two light-colored rectangular objects on its roof. To the left of this building, two white cars are parked in a lot. To the upper right, there's an open area, possibly a lot, with what appears to be a blue tarp covering some items. Further to the right, a lighter-colored building is visible.
Name that loading dock.
(I'll follow up with hints.)
#DynDNSHistory
I have this weird recurring alternate reality in my dreams where at some point in the process of absorbing #DynDNS, #Oracle just gave up and somehow I became in charge of it again. (Maybe in this reality Oracle never bought it? I'm not sure.)
I don't know what this says about me but crimping […]
I feel like there were other things I wanted to talk about re: credit card processing but this thread is long already and I can't remember them. Any questions? Let me know and I'll be happy to answer them!
And enjoy the joy of Stripe! (I wonder if they're actually a good company, ethically […]
Okay, I've been remiss again on my #DynDNSHistory. It's almost like there's shit going on in the world. Right. But all the more reason to escape to reminisce about the past!
Today, I promised credit card processing shenanigans. Back in the early aughts, if you wanted to accept credit cards […]
Next time on #DynDNSHistory I'll talk about credit card processing - it was so much more complicated than just getting a Stripe account those days.
The hoops and shenanigans we had to go through as a small start-up doing online card processing in those early days were wild.
7/7
Today's #DynDNSHistory brought to you by @jtk , who asks about early or interesting abuse-related issues.
There's lots here so this one will be a thread...
The first one that jumps to mind is credit card fraud. This isn't really surprising/interesting in the later days, but what surprised me […]
A bit of #DynDNSHistory that runs close to my heart: the archives of our system status page.
It's really fun looking back on the shoestring with which we ran things, and the kinds of shenanigans we got up to (and people put up with). I feel like people wouldn't put up with that crap today […]
Whelp, I've lost my mental thread of #DynDNSHistory, so I just did some browsing on the wayback machine...
Apparently back in 2000 we ran an NNTP server for tech support. That's pretty funny to think about these days, I feel like that must have really been on the very tail end of NNTP's […]
My 2001 explanation of how recursive DNS works still holds up pretty okay: web.archive.org/web/20030210121333/http:...
Except for a misspelling in "non-existent"...
#DynDNSHistory #DNS #Geek
Two tower PCs and a 1U rack-mount server (sitting on its side), with a Linksys wifi router and keyboard sitting on top of one tower, and a cable modem and some CD cases on top of the other. The tower with the router on top has a FreeBSD sticker on it and is labeled "hematite".
More #DynDNSHistory in a #RoomWhereItHappened: this was at my apartment in Worcester, MA, as we were prepping for Dyn's really big move from that Ithaca colo into a real live datacenter with real racks and everything - Exodus BOS03 in Waltham, MA.
The […]
[Original post on union.place]
#DynDNS was built on Perl, BIND, Apache, FreeBSD, and once we started doing email services, Exim. Our #OpenSource roots went deep, and we had fun with it too.
More #DynDNSHistory time!
One year at OSCON (the O'Reilly Open Source Convention) in San Diego we rented out the hotel bar and brought […]
Today's #DynDNSHistory is answering a question from @drscriptt . #DynDNS accidentally created a quasi-standard with our DNS update "API". To this day, over 25 years later, dynamic DNS updates for many providers go to a URL of "/nic/update" - and that's our fault.
Why this HTTP(S) mechanism […]
So, #DynDNSHistory seems to be reasonably popular. I can keep picking random topics of interest to me, but also: what do you all want to know? Ask your questions, I will eventually try to answer them. But beware, the answers may be boring! #DynDNS #InternetOldFarts
@ai6yr less "sold", more "was forced out by friends turned business partners turned less than friends". I plan to get there in the #DynDNSHistory series, but if you want a preview and like reading court filings, you can check out […]
A cage of servers. Left to right: a UPS (backup battery), a stack of rack-mount and pizza-box style desktop servers and network devices (8 items high!), and a desktop tower (amethyst, our very first main server). The cabling is messy and embarrassing.
Fun fact: this was DynDNS' first "real" datacenter (meaning: not my bedroom attached to a modem). It was in a basement of an office building on one of Ithaca's hills, with a small local wireless ISP that also did small colo. #DynDNSHistory
(Don't miss the alt […]
[Original post on union.place]
Fun fact: DynDNS started off being served from a 26400 bps dial-up modem. Try doing THAT with modern web sites! #DynDNSHistory
Did you know: DynDNS started because some teenage nerds needed static hostnames for our dynamic IPs ... to run a tiny little niche IRC network?
#DynDNSHistory
