Just laying out a fact.

Alibaba Cloud, a world’s top 4 cloud providers. Simply could not push out a Debian 12 image after the system was released months ago on June 10th, 2023.
To be fair, they have not released any image updates for any systems after June 2023.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230917172058/https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/ecs/user-guide/release-notes-for-2023

Adding that Alibaba Cloud has replied to my feature request for a Debian 12 image – “Alibaba Cloud will release new OS images in a timely fashion after we evaluate market needs and OS release dates.”

An unpleasant Dynadot customer service experience

Following the recent surge of .COM renewal price, and the cool rebrand for Dynadot. I’m considering Dynadot to be a new home for my domains. When I was checking the service out, I had a question and found a bug regarding their email form, as following:

1) Dynadot seemed to mask the WHOIS email address into a URL. This can be a concern when transferring the domain out, as the new registrar will send a confirmation email to the domain owner, based on the contact email listed on the WHOIS database.

Question: Do I then have to turn WHOIS protection off when I need to transfer a domain? Does Dynadot provide any WHOIS email forwarding services?

2) When I tried to contact them via their email form here (https://www.dynadot.com/community/contact), I received a “failure notice” email from the Dynadot email handler and the contact message was never sent to the Dynadot support team (info@dynadot.com).

TL;DR:

The Dynadot support (info@dynadot.com) is not as knowledgeable about the transfer requirements as I wish. And every time I replied to the email thread, a different support engineer came to answer my question. In which, I have to clarify my questions every time since they don’t seem to be reading the communication history, and the context is lost between them.

For more details…

继续阅读“An unpleasant Dynadot customer service experience”

發現阿里雲國際版為新加坡等地域也推出了 BGP 多線精品 EIP,根據文檔 – https://help.aliyun.com/document_detail/171278.html,基本就是 CN2 刪減版,其他一成不變。測試了一下,也確實如此,跟香港區精品 EIP 一樣的套路。而流量費用從 $0.081/GB 一口氣上漲至了 $0.778/GB。

Google Cloud 的 Premium Tier Pricing (China destinations) $0.23 看了都要自愧不如。

Interesting read about how Amazon Route 53 performs massively different with their 4 nameservers, despite the use of Anycast.

I find this still valid today as I observed 3ms ping latency from Vultr Tokyo for both .org and .co.uk (BGP Peered with JPIX), but 50ms for .net, and an outrageous 100ms for .com.

(Same results are observed from my home network – NTT. And of course, in real world scenarios, users are most likely using recursive DNS like Google Public DNS, so authoritative DNS’ performance is neglectable.)

https://whatthe.fi/how-to-make-route53-up-to-10x-times-faster-in-one-single-step-c88d16de342

Debugging memoey leak on Windows 10

For a while now, my Windows PC will suddenly go OOM after 3-weeks of usage. But whenever I was inspecting the Task Manager, I found no clue as to why the system will go OOM despite plenty of available memory left. Today, I caught my system “red-handed” again, and this time, the data on the Task Manager does not add up.

96% memory usage despite the process memory figures do not add up.

RamMap result – occupied by Nonpaged Pool. After reading some materials from the Internet, this seems to be related to memory leak.

PoolMon diagnostic, lock on the suspect – dxgmms1.sys. (Bytes gradually increasing, and was not being released at all)

Used command: .\poolmon.exe -p -d /g “C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Debuggers\x64\triage\pooltag.txt”

(Note: You could skip the installation of Visual Studio and only download the WDK if you only need this tool – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/other-wdk-downloads#step-2-install-the-wdk)

Checked the file, totally legit Microsoft-signed, DirectX related driver file. Unfortunately, I do not have a good way to further locate the possible mitigation. For now, I have updated my graphics card driver and upgraded Windows 10 to the latest 22H2, and see if anything gets improved.

Ref:
https://blog.csdn.net/weixin_40188600/article/details/82853017
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/finding-a-memory-leak

Following the takeover of LTT channel, it is time to revisit session cookies

Google article: Phishing campaign targets YouTube creators with cookie theft malware

With 2-factor authentication becoming more and more main-stream nowadays, attackers turn back to the ancient way – tricking people into downloading malware, thus getting the cookies information stored on their local computer, and being able to log in to their active accounts using those session cookies.

It seems that a qualified security software on a Windows system is still a must, and isn’t leaving any day soon.

靜候事故報告的阿里雲多區可用性疑惑

阿里雲故障公告:https://www.alibabacloud.com/zh/notice/repair1218

一般來說,一個地域的一個可用區故障不可怕,然而阿里雲本次香港 C 區帶來的後果卻更像一個地域故障。中控基本不可用,自己在 C 區的 ECS 資源經過了 10+ 小時未恢復。多家報障的大型客戶理應有多可用區的設定,卻也未能恢復服務。實在是令人質疑阿里雲的多可用區設計。

更新:事後複盤報告 – https://www.alibabacloud.com/zh/notice/066572