04 Mar 2014
Recently I’ve moved my blog to Jekyll. This included moving my domain freenerd.de, which is now registered with gandi.net and hosted on github pages. Here is some experience from my move:
- Switching .de domains is fast The last time I moved a domain, I had to fax (as in fax machine) a signed KK-Antrag and wait for days until the switch happened. Today, one only has to enter an auth code and wait for the DNS TTL to switch to the new registration, boom, done.
- Think of your mail I’m running my mail through my domain. While switching registration, I also got new mail servers. These have to be configured. Do that before the switch. Also FYI: Gandi allows to forward email (for incoming mail) and still have a mailbox (for outgoing mail) for the same email address.
- The CNAME influences all your domain When you change the CNAME file in your Github Pages repo, all other Github Pages from all your other projects will also be redirected to your custom domain. Example: The honeypot repo pages used to live under
http://freenerd.github.io/honeypot but now are at http://www.freenerd.de/honeypot. This is cool. But remember to not re-use these paths in your blog though.
- No apex domains with Gandi I couldn’t get them to work, since Gandi does not support
ALIAS records. So I’m running everything under the www. subdomain now.
Github has good documentation on using a custom domain. Still, for completeness, here is the important bit of my gandi dns zone file:
@ 10800 IN A 192.30.252.153
@ 10800 IN A 192.30.252.154
www 10800 IN CNAME freenerd.github.io.