Defeat Terrorism, Cure Cancer, Win a Mythic Beasts Mug

April 17th, 2014 by

Pete before the London Marathon

On Monday, one of our founders Pete is going to run the Boston Marathon which was the site of a terrible terrorist incident last year. You defeat terrorism by not being scared and not changing your plans, so despite the massive security inconvenience he’s gone anyway.

Last week Pete went for a run around the London Marathon course with Jeremy and Chris, as they’d always planned to turn up and together. Sadly Chris wasn’t able to make it because a fatal brain tumour in 2012 has set back his training quite badly – it’s not looking promising he’ll make the start line next year either.

 

 

 

So if you were feeling charitable, and wanted to win a Mythic Beasts Mug, you could make a donation to cancer research at Jeremy’s fund raising page, putting your time prediction in as a comment in the form

MB account-number 3:15:30

If you get the closest result to his finishing time we’ll send you a very limited edition Mythic Beasts Mug.

If you want some information to guide your mug winning entry, all of Pete’s training from January to March was curtailed with a foot injury. his first run back was the Cambridge Half Marathon (1:39), and last week in London did a final training run with a hang over and toilet break in 3:27:22. Last year when on form he ran 2:59:28 again in London. Boston has hills and the course is a straight line so wind conditions can make a big difference.

Dynamic DNS

April 9th, 2014 by

With DynDNS shutting down their free dynamic DNS service quite a few customers contacted us to ask for an upgrade to our DNS API so that it can effortlessly substitute in for DynDNS. For example we saw this request over twitter.

Several people offered a suggested implementation. They all asked for something along these lines,

Can you make it so that when you put an update for an A record through
it can substitute in the calling IP address instead of supplying one.

It’s clear that many of our customers still don’t instinctively get the implications of dual stack hosting yet.

In particular if you call the API from a v6 address and ask for an update to your A record it will fail because it doesn’t know your v4 address. Similarly if you call it from a v4 address and ask for an update to your AAAA record, it will also fail for precisely the same reason. You have to call the API to update your A or AAAA record over the correct v4/v6 channel in order to get the correct update, and if you’re dual stack you need to call it twice.

We decided that we should fasttrack this project, and gave it to Liam Fraser – who’s back with us during his Easter holidays. We’re proud to present our fully documented and enhanced Dynamic DNS API which sample code for single (v4 or v6) and dual (v4 and v6) stack hosts.

We include our DNS API free of charge for anyone who’s bought a domain name from us, so if you’d like to use our Dynamic DNS service, create an account at our control panel and follow the instructions.

If you’re bored of working for a company where you can’t get things done, and would like to work somewhere where you can implement, test, document and release a small enhancement in about six hours, you can apply for a job with us here. We’re especially interested in talented graduates and school leavers who know their Linux.

Up to 33% off new domain registrations

April 2nd, 2014 by

It’s a Wednesday, which means more new top-level domains! This week’s new gTLDs are .camp, .education, .glass, .institute and .repair.

To celebrate all the domain name possibilities, we’re running a one week promotion on new registrations for all new gTLDs launched so far this year, with 33% off one year registrations, and discounts on longer registration periods too.

A full list of discounted domains is available on our Domains page.

The promotion will end at midnight on 9th April, so you can get next week’s new domains at the reduced price if you’re quick.

2nd Apr 9th Apr 15th/16th Apr
.camp .coffee .photo (15th Apr)
.education .florist .holiday (16th Apr)
.glass .house .marketing (16th Apr)
.institute .international
.repair .solar