Category: News

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has officially reserved the .internal top-level domain (TLD) for private use at the DNS level. This decision aims to provide a standardized TLD for internal networks, similar to how certain IPv4 address blocks are reserved for private use.

Resolved (2024.07.29.06), the Board reserves .INTERNAL from delegation in the DNS root zone permanently to provide for its use in private-use applications. The Board recommends that efforts be undertaken to raise awareness of its reservation for this purpose through the organization’s technical outreach.

https://www.icann.org/en/board-activities-and-meetings/materials/approved-resolutions-special-meeting-of-the-icann-board-29-07-2024-en#section2.a (2024-08-19)

Key points

1. The .internal TLD will never be delegated in the global DNS root, ensuring it can be safely used for internal networks without conflicts.
2. This move addresses the issue of organizations creating ad hoc TLDs for private use, which could lead to confusion.
3. Google’s VP and Chief Internet Evangelist, Vint Cerf, revealed that Google and many of its cloud customers have been using .internal for years.
4. ICANN believes this reservation won’t introduce new security or stability issues, but its effectiveness in improving the current situation remains uncertain.

Network administrators now have a sanctioned alternative for internal DNS naming, potentially simplifying and standardizing private network configurations across the internet.

The following message greeted multiple people on August 9th, 2024 at 09:47 CEST. It recovered by opening the portal fresh in the tab. But after the recent incident with Cloudstrike and other incidents immediately, your mind goes wandering when you see a large central structure greeting you and your colleagues with an error message.

The request is blocked.

https://portal.azure.com/Error/UE_SessionExpired#view/Microsoft_Azure_Support/SupportRequestDetails.ReactView/id/*** (2024-08-09 09:47)

The Mozilla Observatory is a well-known web tool that verifies your website’s security baseline. Achieving a high score is a good indicator of your website’s security awareness.

It’s also a highly visible and effective indicator for website visitors. Having a high score is, therefore, not only a good practice but also an advertisement for your competency.

I am a free customer of Freshping service. Since yesterday evening July 9th, 2024, my integration with pushover.net using a webhook has stopped working, and I couldn’t find any way to fix it. My integration remains present, and the configuration appears to be correct. However, webhooks seem not to be sending out notifications. Due to the announced service change, I do not qualify for support anymore as a free user.

Microsoft is currently undergoing maintenance and is not providing RSS feeds for Azure updates. The last regular updates was on June 3rd, 2024. For me, this is a major inconvenience.

Azure Updates website is undergoing maintenance. During this time, you may notice limited functionality affecting RSS feeds and search features. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Critical updates and retirements will also be communicated via emails and service health alerts.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates (2024-06-21)

The alternative fallback is here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-updates/bg-p/AzureUpdates

But this is no longer easily machine readable.

This once more points out the importance of the service health alerts which should be monitored for every resource.

I still hope that this service limitation will end soon, but for now, I haven’t seen any plans for when the service will return to regular operation.

I recently came across an article online that detailed how, following a DDoS attack, the invoice from the cloud provider skyrocketed. It is crucial to monitor how a volumetric attack can impact your costs, particularly in terms of egress traffic or the resources needed from engineers to combat it. Implementing automated solutions such as rate limiting and traffic signals is highly recommended for a more efficient response. Remember to consider the cloud egress prices when devising your strategy.

Please also take into account auto-scaling limits, alerts. Also cost alerts, and spending limits should be in place.