DNS Made Easy is actually pretty easy

In a spontaneous burst of productivity, spawned mostly by my complete and utter failure as a sysadmin, I moved my parent’s email account off my server, and onto Google’s Apps for your Domain platform.

This finally gave me an excuse to move my DNS hosting to DNS Made Easy. The move turned out to be easier than I thought, and stunningly fast. The dark times of multi-day propagation waiting-periods are (apparently) over: the whole process from account signup to complete and totally successful migration was about an hour. I'm thrilled. This is the best hosting-related $15 I've spent all year.

I've moved my parent’s domain over, as well as mikewest.org. While moving the latter, I had a little fun setting up “Vanity DNS.” I have no need for this feature whatsoever, and it’ll probably cause me some pain in the future whenever the nameserver IP addresses change for whatever reason, but it satisfies my inner geek to see ns0.mikewest.org as the canonical name server for my domain:

So, two thumbs up for DNS Made Easy. They’re absolutely living up to their name’s promise.

Potentially Useful Technical Note

Relatedly, the lookupd command is gone in Leopard. If you want to clear your DNS cache under 10.5, you need to use dscacheutil. I've added a quick alias to my ~/.bash_login file, because I'm sure I'm going to forget this in about 10 minutes.

alias flushcache='sudo dscacheutil -flushcache';

I'd suggest you do the same, if you plan on mucking about with DNS settings, or editing your hosts file.