Month: September 2021

DNS demystified

Posted on by admin

A lot of the time, when you are editing DNS records, there is a confusion between acronyms.
A Record, CNAME, MX, TXT, etc What are all these? Please read on

TOP level domain > .com .net
Second Level domain .co.nz .com.au etc

SOA record Start of Authority record -> it just simply all details about the domain for example, nameservers, name of the admin, TTL etc.

A Record is used to translate the domain name to its IP address.
yourdomain.com points to> 50.63.202.11

NS Record Name Server Record ns1.yourhosting.com ns2.yourhosting.com

PTR record is a reverse of A record. It looks up for name against IP address.

CNAME stands for Canonical name
Suppose you have an existing domain (DomainA) resolving to an IP address. And the you purchased a second domain (DomainB).
You dont want DomainB to resolve to different IP address. You want to point it to the same IP address as domain A.
What you can do is map the second domain (DomainB) to the existing domain (DomainA) so that the resolve to the same IP address as DomainA.
The result is when a user enters any of these domains, it will direct them to the same website (or same IP address).

Throw in a Nerdy side of me, you can remember CNAME like this.
Who is Bruce Wayne > Look up for Batman > and Batman stays at 1007 Mountain Drive, Gotham.

ALIAs is just like CNAME but the difference is you cant have CNAME for naked domain names, for example mydomain.com
It has to be either A record or an ALIAS.
ALIASes are normally used in AWS to point to AWS resources like EC2, S3, load balancers etc.


TTL Time to live, its basically Caching on either the resolving server or on your local system.
The lower the TTL, the faster it resolves. It could take 48 hours to propagate on all the servers throughout the internet.

MX records are mainly used for emails, if you are setting up an email like mymail@mydomain.com, then you are going to use this.



AWS Access Key and Secret Access Key (SIMPLIFIED)

Posted on by admin

There are two ways to access AWS environments.
1) Console Access
2) Programmatic Access

1) Console Access is when you access to AWS portal with your username and password. The GUI interface

2) In Programmatic Access, you are accessing AWS resources using Command lines, Powershell or SDKs.


-> With Programmatic Access, you are accessing using Access Key ID and Secret Access Keys.

Access Key ID and Secret Access Keys are different from your username and password.


When you create your first AWS account, Access Key ID and Secret Access Keys are also created.

It is important to secure or disable them, and not share these Access Key ID and Secret Access Keys otherwise this will give you the root access to your AWS account.

The best practice would be to create a new user and give specific permissions rather than using the root account.

AWS STS Security Token Service is another way to create a temporary, Limited-privileges credentials to IAM users.


To Disable Access Key, navigate to Identity and Access Management (IAM) under Services. > Manage Access Keys.

Disabling this is one way to secure the account, if programmatic access is not required.

Teza