Category: Amazon

Mapping NFS Drive on Windows 2008R2

I have had some trouble mapping an NFS Drive on Windows 2008R2.  It appears my issues relate to simple syntax.  I was using Amazon Workspaces and that runs on Windows 2008R2 Datacenter.  My NFS drive is running on on EC2 in Ubuntu on the same VPC.  I chose NFS over Samba hoping that it will make file transfers a bit quicker.

The command I used to map was \\localip\shared-folder E:

Where E: is the drive letter.  This is how it would look: mount \\172.16.1.1\shared Z:

The other stumbling block I had was not seeing the drive in Windows Explorer.  By not seeing the drive in there I had a program that also couldn’t see the drive.  The answer to this situation was to run the mount command with a regular command prompt and not an elevated command prompt.

Live and Learn.

Should I use Google Domains or Amazon as my registrar?

Should I use Google Domains or Amazon as my registrar?  That’s the question I have been asking myself.  Right now it looks like Google is the better deal because you can use it’s DNS service for free while Amazon charges for their Route 53 service (50 cents per month per domain).  When it comes to heavy usage I have no idea which company would be better but I’d assume they would be very similar on reliability.

Both services have several things in common from pricing to private registration to security.  When talking about their pricing being the same neither company is very competitive.  While we are only talking about a couple of dollars versus a base rate on a competitive registrar those couple of dollars can add up when you are paying for several dozen names a year.  That’s what makes it even harder for me to recommend domain registration through Route 53.  I would have to pay the annual $12 for a .com AND $7 on top of that for DNS.

I use Amazon’s AWS services almost exclusively because they were one of the first and they have a strong community to lean on for support.  I would like to see both services increase the competition in the registrar field.  It’s due for some innovation.

Google Domains Beta

As you can see from the screenshot it’s a very simple interface for changing a domain’s settings.  All I did was transfer one my own domains to google to see how it would work.  Certainly it is still in beta but I can’t see why they wouldn’t roll this out soon.

Amazon Beats Google to the Punch and Offers Domain Registration

Amazon beat Google out the door with domain registration through it’s AWS services.  Specifically Route 53.  Now we all know that Google is going to roll out this feature but it is still in beta.  In fact, I still haven’t gotten my invite for the service.

I just checked their prices and they are not competitive at all.  $12 for a .com or a .org.  $15 for a .in.   Every year domain pricing increases so it is possible that they won’t keep raising their rates each year and just absorb the costs.  The other thing is AWS is focused on businesses and not resellers.  Businesses don’t like uncertainty.  If they can keep the domain prices fixed for an extended period of time that would be helpful.

Here was the email I received:

Dear Amazon Web Services Customer, 

Today, we are pleased to inform you about some changes regarding Amazon Route 53, a highly available and scalable DNS service:

Domain Name Registration

You can now purchase a new domain name or transfer the management of your existing domain name to Route 53. When you purchase new domains via Route 53, the service will automatically configure a Hosted Zone for each domain and ensure the privacy of your WHOIS record at no additional charge. In addition, you benefit from AWS’s consolidated billing to manage your domain name expenses alongside all of your other AWS resources. Route 53 offers a selection of more than 150 top-level domains (TLDs), including the major generic TLDs like .com, .net, .org, and .info, and country TLDs including .co.uk, .de, .tv, and .com.au. Getting started with Route 53 Domain Name Registration is easy. Please see the Route 53 documentation for more details.

Geographic Routing with Geo DNS

Route 53’s Geo DNS support lets you balance load by directing requests to specific endpoints based on the geographic location from which the request originates. Geo DNS makes it possible to customize localized content, such as presenting detail pages in the right language or restricting distribution of content to only the markets you have licensed. Geo DNS also lets you balance load across endpoints in a predictable, easy-to-manage way, ensuring that each end-user location is consistently routed to the same endpoint. Geo DNS provides three levels of geographic granularity: continent, country, and state, and Geo DNS also provides a global record which is served in cases where an end user’s location doesn’t match any of the specific Geo DNS records you have created. You can also combine Geo DNS with other routing types, such as Latency Based Routing and DNS Failover, using Route 53’s Alias feature in order to enable a variety of low-latency and fault-tolerant architectures. To learn more, please see the Route 53 documentation.

Lower Prices for DNS Queries

Effective August 1, we are lowering Route 53 prices for both Standard Queries and Latency Based Routing Queries by 20%. As before, queries to Alias records that are mapped to Elastic Load Balancers, Amazon CloudFront distributions, and Amazon S3 website buckets are free. Full details are available on the Route 53 pricing page.

Sincerely,
The Amazon Route 53 Team