domain names – Dan Q

Vanity Nameservers (White-Label DNS) in 2026

When you buy a domain name, your registrar will typically offer to provide you with a collection of DNS nameservers. For most people, most of the time, that’s plenty sufficient.

A trip back to 2006

This wasn’t always the case. In the long-distant past, I’ve registered domains for which I’ve had to run my own nameservers. Or else, where I’ve chosen to run my own nameservers in order to gain more control, or power, or just to ~~play about with the technology~~ inevitably break things.

When I transitioned to using third-party DNS around 2006, I used to be a big fan of vanity nameservers. “Vanity nameservers” (or “white-label DNS”) is where your nameservers are hosted at subdomains of the domain for which they’re the nameserver.

So instead of the nameservers for danq.me being, say, looking like ns-48-a.gandi.net and ns-228-b.gandi.net, they might look like, say, ns1.danq.me and ns2.danq.me. They might still be provided by the same third-party (or might not!), but you don’t get to see that. DNS protocol doesn’t care about the hostname it’s connecting to, it just needs the right A/AAAA records and it’s good to go!

Well, once you solve the bootstrapping problem, anyway!

If the nameservers for a domain are at a subdomain of that domain, you’ve got a circular dependency. To solve that, you have the servers one level higher provide “glue records” in addition to the list of nameservers. The glue records, which are shown in the “additional section:” of dig‘s output, above, solve the circular dependency. Now, the nameservers can be found without first having to… find the nameservers!

Vanity nameservers in 2026

The essential steps for setting up vanity nameservers are fundamentally the same as they always were. Propagation times are much shorter now and I was able to have the whole thing done and dusted within a couple of hours. In case you’re looking to follow-along, here’s the broad steps (the specifics depends on your registrar, DNS provider, etc.):

Set up A (and AAAA, it’s 2026 you know!) records pointing ns1.example.com (or whatever your domain is) to their IP addresses.¹
Change the NS records for your domain to point to your new vanity nameservers.
Change the SOA record for your domain to point to the first vanity nameserver². Bump your serial.
Have your registrar create glue records mirroring those you created in step 1.
Have your registrar change the authoritative nameservers for your domain to those you created in step 1.
(Optional) 😰 Frantically and repeatedly poke the registry’s DNS servers with dig until you’re confident that you didn’t just make a hideous typo and broke your domain in a way that would have been a pain in the arse to unpick when you last did this, in 2006. Calm down when you remember that it’s 2026 and nowadays it’s gonna be easy to fix via some API or web portal of your registrar!

That’s all there is to it.

But… why would anybody do this?

For most folks, this is pointless. Larger companies, especially in tech fields, sometimes do it as a branding exercise, especially if they’re re-selling services atop somebody else’s infrastructure and don’t want to so-clearly lampshade that³. But I took a look and… I don’t think people bother any more.

Hit up a handful of corporate domains you know and, with the exception of the few that run their own DNS, you’ll see the same big providers keep cropping up: Cloudflare, Amazon, Google, Microsoft… I experimentally probed a hundred or so domains that I thought might use “vanity DNS” in front of a third-party DNS service… and found… none⁴.

Nobody cares any more. You’re either running your own, or you tell the world who’s running it for you, with no in-between.

Bringing back an old tradition

Vanity DNS is a dying art.

Soo… I’m now doing vanity DNS on danq.me; it’s the first time I’ve run vanity DNS on a personal domain since… I want to say 2010‽ The journey started when Jacob asked me about my DNS setup, and it made me nostalgic for a time when nerdy techies whose nameservers were provided by a third party would just “do” vanity DNS as a matter of course.

Vanity DNS felt nerdy and fun back in 2006. And I guess that nowadays… it still feels nerdy and fun. It’s still as pointless as it ever was, but I don’t care. I’m doing something that I thought was cool when I first learned about it in 2001, just for the fun of it.

Type dig NS danq.me in your terminal to see the result: four nameservers, all with a .danq.me suffix⁵. Cute!

Footnotes

¹ There’s a convention of naming nameservers ns1, ns2, ns3 etc., but if you want “fun” names then that’s fine too. Cloudflare’s nameservers have cute names, if you haven’t seen already!

² Check your dotted-notation hostmaster email while you’re there; everybody forgets to look at these and so they’re often outdated.

³ Using vanity nameservers to conceal an underlying DNS provider does not conceal the third-party’s identity because you can always use the IP address of those nameservers to work out who’s behind them. For example, if you’re interested in seeing who’s really providing the DNS for danq.me, you might run NS_NAME=`dig NS danq.me +short | head -n1` to get the name of a random one of my nameservers, then NS_IP=`dig ${NS_NAME} +short | head -n1` to get its IP address, and finally do an reverse DNS lookup on that with e.g. dig -x $NS_IP. Often, this canonical name will be a giveaway and you won’t even have to look at the lists of who owns which blocks of IP addresses. It’s not a secret. (Gotta admit, though I’m not entirely happy with my provider… maybe it’s time to switch… or even go back to selfhosting DNS once more!)

⁴ whatsapp.com appears to have its own nameservers a.ns.whatsapp.com through d.ns.whatsapp.com, but their A records point to IP addresses whose reverse DNS names are a.ns.facebook.com through d.ns.facebook.com. Not terribly exciting, nor surprising, that Meta are running their own DNS services for their various properties (the same thing happens with instagram.com). paypal.com seems to have both its own DNS servers and some replicas provided by Digicert UltraDNS, which for a moment excited me when I thought that they might be part-way through a white-labelling exercise, but no: they’re two different services. I thought I’d find something interesting via one of the big blog, eccomerce, or VPS providers that offer free subdomains: folks like Bearblog, Dreamwidth, Substack or Medium. But nope; some seem to run their own DNS, and others just sit on top of a big third-party. Sigh.

⁵ Want to see the glue records? Run dig NS me +short to get the names of the authoritative nameservers for the .me TLD, e.g. a0.nic.me, and then query it directly with e.g. dig NS danq.me @a0.nic.me: you’ll see not just that I have four nameservers under .danq.me but also their IP addresses (in the “additional section”) – that’s the glue doing its thing!

The “ChangeNames.co.uk” Scam

👋 Hi! If you came here after going to ChangeNames.co.uk, congratulations: you just dodged getting scammed.

To actually change your name for free as a British citizen, without giving your personal information to scammers (or anybody else who doesn’t need it!), I suggest you use FreeDeedPoll.org.uk. Want an alternative? DeedPoll.lgbt is good too!

I help people change their names

As a British citizen, you can change your name for free. That’s the entire premise behind my website FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, which since 2011 has helped thousands of people change their names¹ for free and without a solicitor.

Screenshot showing FreeDeedPoll.org.uk. — It’s a pretty useful website, if I say so myself.

I aim to run the most-ethical service of its type:

As noted, it’s completely free and collects no personal information whatsoever.
It’s funded out of my own pocket so it doesn’t need to depend upon advertising.
It’s open source so anybody can inspect my code, or run it themselves, or even set up a “competing” copy (so long as they give away the code to that, too)!
I try to answer every email I receive from anybody who’s having difficulty with the process.²

Scammers will barely help you, but they will steal your data

Others, however, don’t.

I’m not talking about all the paid-for services. Some of them provide a useful service, albeit one that you don’t strictly need to pay for. I’m not a fan of those that try to market themselves as “official”, though, because that just feels like fraud. No, I’m talking about a level of sliminess that goes well beyond merely charging somebody for something they’re entitled to for free.

Like… let me show you an email I received today:

I tried to visit their website but it looks like they haven’t even bought the domain name they’re advertising, yet. Just for fun, I’ve registered it and set it up as a permanent redirect to this blog post³.

Their TikTok channel exists, but it’s not at the URL they provided. So far, so incompetent.

Gotta admit, their video production quality’s better than mine… even if the content isn’t!

Both their YouTube and TikTok channels provide a link not to their “website” but to a kit.com page that asks for some personal details with the promise of a deed poll at the end of it.

When you fill in the form – and obviously you shouldn’t do so using real information – you get added to a marketing email list and a handful of other mailing lists get pushed at you.

Kit.com require double-opt-in confirmation for mailing lists, but the email tries to trick you into clicking the button, saying that clicking the “confirm your subscription” button “help us know you have received the deed poll and everything works”. In reality, they’re just trying to legitimise their spamming.

And what do you get out of it after all this? A hyperlink to a publicly-accessible Google Drive folder called “Deed Polls”[sic]⁴ that a more-ethical outlet could have just linked to in the first place. it contains a couple of Word documents that require you to delete a ton of underscores in order to type your own content in.

Oh, the the templates are full of mistakes. Here’s one (there are others!):

Of all the scammy free deeds poll services I’ve seen, ChangeNames is the worst

What we’ve got here is…

a marketing scam pretending to be a deeds poll service,
being run ineptly, e.g. marketing using a domain name they haven’t yet purchased and providing broken links to their own social media,
that are using unethical techniques to harvest personal information,
in exchange for a deed poll template that’s riddled with errors. 🤦

But the really insane thing about this whole scam is that a human being found my video about my own (superior, ethical) service FreeDeedPoll.org.uk… and then figured that they’d email me to see if I’d like to pass some traffic to their (inferior, unethical) competitor.

That bit… that’s the bit that blows my mind.

Footnotes

¹ I can’t tell you exactly how many because I make a deliberate effort to collect no personal information, without which I’m unable to pin down a specific number. But I’ve had many hundreds of emails from people who’ve changed their names, and have anonymous statistics to suggest that the number is almost-certainly in the tens of thousands, maybe in the low hundreds of thousands.

² I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve become pretty familiar with lots of relevant parts of the laws about not just names but adjacent areas like citizenship, residency, gender identity, information protection, and parental rights, and I’ve been able to point many people towards satisfactory conclusions when they’ve had more-challenging name changes.

³ It might not be working yet, depending on the state of DNS propagation, but it’ll get there in a day or so I reckon.

⁴ The plural of deed poll is, of course, deeds poll, but one could hardly expect these clowns to know that.

Chinese Domain Name Scam

I find a lot of these “this company is tried to usurp your brand with Chinese domain name purchases” emails in my spam folder, corresponding to my (many) domains. They’re a scam, of course: the scammer is trying to goad me into saying “No, please help protect my brand identity, I’ll pay you over the odds for these .cn domains!”

But I’ve always wondered – what happens if you reply and say “Yes, Baokang Ltd DO represent my business interests in China, please go ahead and let them register these domains.” I’d know that was a lie, and the scammer would know that was a lie (the company, if it even exists, is under their control in the first place)… but they can’t admit that they know that.

Anybody tried baiting this kind of scammer in that way before? (With the usual scambaiting precautions, of course!)

Enumerating Domains

I’ve just enumerated my personal domain names. There’s a lot fewer of them than there used to be!¹

Anyway: here’s the list –

danq.me and a variety of aliases (danq.uk, danq.dev, danq.link, danq.blog, scatmania.org); there’s also like a billion subdomains in use of course, like things.danq.me and find.danq.me
freedeedpoll.org.uk, which I really ought to update at some point but which still clearly helps many people
dndle.app, a D&D-inspired Wordle-clone which I still get bug reports and pull requests for so clearly somebody’s using it
geohashing.site, the central hub of Geohashing activity worldwide
egxchange.org, which hosts the most environmentally-friendly cryptocurrency wallet you’ll ever see
abnib.co.uk, a community of friends (also with about a billion subdomains)
q-t-a.uk, my family website, which exists mostly to facilitate addressing for a stack of internal/selfhosted services
rockmonkey.org.uk, which doesn’t do much nowadays
fleeblewidget.co.uk, my partner’s blog, but I look after the domain registration
textplain.blog, my plain-text blog
levellers.blog, the blog of my D&D group
theimprobable.blog, which I look after on behalf of my partner’s brother after using it to GPS-track his adventures

I think that’s all of them, but it’s hard to be sure…

Footnotes

¹ Maybe I’ve finally shaken off my habit of buying a domain name for everything. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve embraced subdomains for more stuff. Probably the latter.

Non Stop Hammer Ti.me

You know how sometimes I make a thing and, in hindsight, it doesn’t make much sense? And at best, all it can be said to do is to make the Internet more fun and weird?

I give you: NonStopHammerTi.me.

Things that make it awesome:

Well, the obvious.
Vanilla Javascript.
CSS animations timed to every-other-beat.
Using an SVG stroke-dasharray as a progress bar.
Progressively-enhanced; in the worst case you just get to download the audio.
PWA-enhanced; install it to your mobile!
Open source!
Decentralised (available via the peer-web at dat://nonstophammerti.me/ / dat://0a4a8a..00/)
Accessible to screen readers, keyboard navigators, partially-sighted users, just about anybody.
Compatible with digital signage at my workplace…

That is all.

Use a .dev domain? Not anymore.

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Use a .dev domain? Not anymore. (medium.engineering)

For years, programmers used .dev domains for testing their code. Those days are over.

…

Daryl Koopersmith

For the love of god, not everything is about cats

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Earlier this week, the Spanish government raided the Barcelona office of the PuntCat Foundation, the company that administers the .cat domain, and arrested one of its senior executives.

PuntCat means “dot cat” in Catalan, the language spoken in the Catalonian region of Spain as well as places in France, Andorra, and Italy. The office was raided because Catalonia hopes to hold a referendum on October 1 to decide if it should secede from Spain, and in an effort to quash the referendum, the government of Spain ordered puntCat to “block all .cat domain names that may contain any kind of information about the forthcoming independence referendum,” according to a press release from the foundation.

This is an astonishing attempt at censorship by a member of the E.U. but, unfortunately, that aspect is going largely uncovered because the media is idiotically obsessed with cats…

Adrianne Jeffries (The Outline)

bad.horse. You were all thinking it.

This link was originally posted to /r/dotHorse. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.

The original link was: https://www.bad.horse/

Domain Name Hacks of 2013

Now that the list of new top-level domain applications for 2013 has been revealed, geeks around the world can start planning for the domain hacks of the future. Please.do.not.disturb.me was fun, and all, but the if many or all of these new registries are willing to sell their domains to anybody, there’s a lot of potential for new and unusual domain names.

http://please.do.not.disturb.me/ – a website based on a simple domain name hack

I suspect we’ll soon be typing in addresses like:

jack.and/jill – the .and TLD is clearly supposed to be for the Andalusian community in Spain, but I doubt that’s going to stop people from coming up with imaginative uses for domain names where you can just “put your own suffix” after the .and/, like we used to do before .isgay.com before it got taken over by domain squatters. (note that .gay will soon be a TLD, so there’s probably going to be a whole raft of these new sites soon…)
crow.bar – or as we’ll say at the time, “.bar – it’s not just for bars any more!”
I quite like the idea of sugar.beats, but I think a far more popular use will be “put your own suffix” sites, again, like rock.beats/scissors.
ro.bot- .bot is one of the many TLDs that Amazon is going for, and it seems likely to me that they’re going to try to resell domains underneath it. I’m just not sure whether sex.bot or ro.bot will be first to be snatched up.
not.just.broke.but.broker – perhaps you have to be in my head to find this amusing.
fizz.buzz. This web site would have the best hit counter ever on it (why?).
s.care, s.cars, s.expert, s.tab, and dozens of other domain names that are only a letter away from meaning something completely different – and that letter is often “s”.
mon.day, sun.day, dooms.day, birth.day – etc. etc. I’d buy birth.day if the price was right, and then run a basic site spanning happy.birth.day, first.birth.day, and the like, with automatically-generated content on each. It’d be fun.
yo.dog – a complete abuse of the .dog TLD, no matter what its purpose is supposed to be. Better still, I’d put a page at http://yo.dog.yo.dog/yo.dog, containing the message “I heard you like domain names in your domain names, so I put a domain name in a domain name.” (why?)
electric.fan – the website that Koreans will set as one another’s home page, as a cruel prank against the superstitious.
jelly.fish would be an awesome domain name! Who wouldn’t want to have the email address throw.stones@jelly.fish?
mtee.ggee- the future domain name of Hungry Horse pubs? (get it? “empty gee-gee”?)
a.boy.named.goo, after the Goo Goo Dolls album. But then, I don’t object to domain names with possibly-excessive numbers of dots in them, as the Summer Party On Earth website probably gives away. Hell: I could possibly be using a.home.called.earth as the domain name for our house, in 2013.
fag.got – I’ll bet that homosexual sex blogger Dan Savage, who’s been trying to reclaim the word “faggot”, would love to have the email address hey@fag.got!
bl.ink – I’ve got an idea for a webcam-based site, like ChatRoulette, but with facial recognition software that watches your eye movements. You get paired up with a random stranger and the pair of you have a staring contest, right over the Internet. If you win, you get a point. It’ll be awesome.
commun.ist, rac.ist, anarch.ist, etc. – I’m sure that Istanbul, for whom the .ist TLD is intended, won’t mind if we borrow their new domain name for a few amusing addresses. Like the email address shoot@the.rac.ist, for example.
bob.lob.law/law/blog – with apologies to those who don’t follow Arrested Development.
bi.ngo – sure,.bingo is likely to exist anyway, but this way’s more fun.
fuck.off – I have no idea what anybody else expected the.off TLD to be used for, if not this.
child.ren – I quite like this, because it makes not only a full word, but the first part is a word, too.
im.off.ski – faux Russian is never going to go out of style.
tube.tube.tube – if I can, I’m totally setting this site up in 2013. All that there’ll be is the picture, below, which makes me smile every time I see it.

Honestly, though: it feels like all of these new top-level domain name opportunities take a lot of the fun out of domain hacks. The more TLDs we have, the easier it is to put together words and phrases with the opportunities given.

Scrabble wouldn’t be so enjoyable if each player had a rack of, say, 30 tiles, rather than just 7. The restriction (and working around them) is what makes domain-name-based jokes so funny, in my mind. What are we supposed to do in a world where anybody with a spare $185,000 USD can have anything he wants?

When I realise that the era of funny domain hacks is coming to an end, it makes me a little sad. But then I look at that picture of a polar bear and everything’s okay again. Tuuuuuuube!

Reply #13108

This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.

Sian wrote:

Going to be registering a website thingy tonight to mess around with. Any hints/tips/advice from all you people who know about this stuff would be gratefully received. I am, after all, officially computer illiterate.

Register your domain name with somebody respectable (won’t rip you off or otherwise fuck up) like Easily, who’ll give you a domain name (whateveryoulike.co.uk) for as little as £9.99/2 years.

As far as hosting is concerned, I can’t say a bad word about the fantastic DreamHost, who now provide hosting for me, Paul, Claire, Matt (from SmartData), JTA & Ruth, Statto… etc. etc.

I’m not sure if it still works, but if you sign up for their Crazy Domain Insane offer ($9.95/month), paying for the first year up-front, and use the promo code “777”, they’ll give you the first YEAR for the price of the first month. Which is nice. And as it includes a free .com domain name of your choice, that’s pretty fab, too (saves you heaps of cash, no commitment to stay with them more than a year anyway, etc.). They’re pretty damn good.

Drop me an e-mail if you want any specific help/advice on such geekibits. Will see what I can do.

Dan Breaks The Internet… Again

Whoops. You’d have thought I’d have learnt my lesson when I fucked around with BIND last year, and ‘broke’ a small portion of the internet, but no. I managed to ‘break the internet’ again while playing with the Domain Name System settings on big. That’s why Scatmania was inaccessible for the last day or so (to most people).

In other news, spent Sunday in the office, working on getting the database for the project I’ve been working on live and online, with some success, despite the power company’s best attempts to stop me. Those in Aber will have experienced the power cuts of Friday and Sunday (half an hour in the second case), which crippled one of SmartData‘s computers with a power spike to it’s PSU – one I’ll be glad to be rid of, admittedly (yet another cheaply made piece of junk from Microland UK). But nevertheless, the power cut was of great inconvenience to those of us trying to work to a deadline, on a Sunday, and wanting to get home in time to go out and see I, Robot. I sat outside in the sun-come-drizzle and read a book that was one of my recommended course texts but that I never got around to reading while I was actually doing my degree, and listened to the occasional screams of the UPS bricks to let me know that I still couldn’t actually get on with some work.

I, Robot was OK… kind-of a re-hashing of the concepts put forward in Blade Runner, Electric Dreams, The Matrix, A.I., and Bicentennial Man, with an excessive use of bullet-time and slow motion. Coherent, though… but you will come out of the cinema saying “See every other robot movie for examples of this theme.”

Right; off to work…

SiteFinder: Mark Two

[this post was damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has not been possible to recover it]

[further fragments of this post were recovered on 12 October 2018]

If you’ve been reading this blog since September-ish, you’ll remember when I had about a week of ranting about the VeriSign/SiteFinder lark: this was where VeriSign, who (in layman’s terms) are responsible for linking all .com, .net, and .org addresses to their respective servers, in September last year put a ‘catch-all’ clause in. In other words, every possible combination of letters and numbers, followed by a .com, .net, or .org, ‘belonged’ to them. This was a complete abuse of their position of power, and caused a great deal of faults amongst systems throughout the internet. In addition, it could eventually have been used (and evidence suggests that the intention was there) to monopolise the internet’s search engine and advertising services.

Well; they’re at it again, as this article (“SiteFinder vs. Engineers: Our Mistake Is Ignorance”) discusses, so you’re likely to see me ranting at least a little more. If they do decide to do it again, they’ve stated that they will “provide 60 or 90 days warning, in order for the appropriate technological …

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #21:

Desperatley try to find a reason not to get a ‘professional’ domain name (e.g. www.avapoet.com), and fail. Panic, and write to your current service provider, asking questions which you’re sure they’ll answer unfavourabley, to save yourself from the urge to get your dream vanity domain. Fail, when they prove to be nothing but useful. Look for justification elsewhere. What do you lot think

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.