On April 1st, I decided to publish my last regular blog post. I meant it to be an ambiguous post. It was supposed to bring questions to my reader’s mind as to whether it was a joke or real. While I really decided to quit making regular posts, I made some changes to DNS records that broke my blog for almost 14 hours. The joke was on me :).


Since a couple of months ago, I have been working on building up a homelab on my continuously running machine. I have most of the services that I want already running on my homelab. I wanted to expose some of the services via a domain name like home.re-ynd.com should point to my Home Assistant instance or git.re-ynd.com should point to my private git server etc. So I was setting up reverse proxy using nginx on the very same day as I published the post.


In the due process of setting up nginx, I also wanted to add a SSL layer, so I can have a https protocol instead of http. So I started certbot service as well. While going through the process I found that it would be easier to use cloudflare since there is already a plugin for cloudflare.


My registrar is squarespace and all my DNS records are with it as well. In fact my original registrar was Google Domains which was later sold to squarespace, and that is how I ended there. Anyway, there is no certbot plugin for squarespace. So I decided to move my DNS records to cloudflare.


I created a free account in cloudflare and used the automatic transfer of DNS records from squarespce to cloudflare. I assumed that all the records were discovered and moved. I did a quick check of the records and everything seemed fine. I checked my blog link retired.re-ynd.com and it worked fine too. I checked if my MX records are working and if I am getting emails when readers commented on my blog, which was also working.


Later in the day, when I published my blog, my better half complained that the link to my blog was not working. So I did a quick check on my laptop and phone and everything was working fine. I thought may be it is taking some time for the DNS records to propagate. At this point, my daughter wanted to play some card games and we sat down to play until dinner time. Before dinner, my better half mentioned again that my link was not working and my comments section was not loading. Then I checked my DNS records and found comments.re-ynd.com was not in the records. So I quickly fixed it, had dinner and went to bed.


The next morning, a friend of mine sent an email mentioning that my email link to the blog was not working. Only then did I realize that it was the link in the email that was not working and not the direct link (retired.re-ynd.com) to my blog. I was just checking retired.re-ynd.com and its DNS records. So then I opened my email and clicked on the email link that goes out when I publish a new post. Again it seemed to work fine and I did not understand what could be wrong.


Then I realized that it is probably my old email sender sendgrid that was having problems. You see, I used to use sendgrid earlier to send emails to my subscribers. Later. I switched to Mailchimp. Links from Mailchimp emails did not have a problem. Only the ones being sent from sendgrid. Again I checked the DNS records for sendgrid and of course those records were missing too.


Then I checked each and every record from squarespace with the DNS records in cloudflare and found a bunch of them missing. I quickly added all the missing records and finally everything was working fine. So be careful when you are moving records from one DNS server to another. Double check all records. Anyway, that is how my blog went down for 14 hours or so.