Planned Spontaneity

Well, I did it. I bit the bullet and turned my gmail account into a meta-account managing all my other email addresses. The experience has left me feeling happy, yet still strangely wanting more. You can read about my impressions of Gmail in my next post.

I’m slowly thinking about transitioning the karulf.com domain from dreamhost to Google apps. For those not in the know, Google Apps lets you run run any or all of Google’s “applications” on your own domain. There are a few differences, but the accounts basically act like a GMail account. This would be a welcomed change from Dreamhost, where the servers are flaky at best. I’d be fine moving over to Google Apps, the problem is, I don’t want to transfer all of my domain, just… most of it.

Here are the services I would move

• Email ( and webmail )
• Main webpage (www.karulf.com)
• Jabber
• Calendar Support

Here are the services I am keeping on dreamhost (or personal servers)

• My blog (erik.karulf.com)
• Subversion (some of my projects aren’t open source)
• Dynamic DNS to my home computers

After some research, I found out how I would do it. This post is probably only useful to me, but to that end it will be invaluable.
Configure Dreamhost’s DNS servers with the following values

• Main Site
  • CNAME
    www-google –> ghs.google.com
  • Dreamhost Specific: Dreamhost will not let you confiure the DNS entries for www or your root level domain (eg. www.karulf.com and karulf.com). They will let you configure those sites to redirect to another URL. I have mine redirect to www-google.karulf.com
• calendar — [ CNAME ] –> ghs.google.com
• start — [ CNAME ] –> ghs.google.com
• docs — [ CNAME ] –> ghs.google.com
• Email
  • MX Aliases (Google Help)
    

    MailServer Hostname:	Priority
    ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.	10
    ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.	30
    ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.	50
    ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.	70

  • SPF Record (Google Help):

    v=spf1 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all.

• Jabber SRV Records (Google Help)

  _xmpp-server._tcp.karulf.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
  _xmpp-server._tcp.karulf.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
  _xmpp-server._tcp.karulf.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
  _xmpp-server._tcp.karulf.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
  _xmpp-server._tcp.karulf.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.
  _jabber._tcp.karulf.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
  _jabber._tcp.karulf.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
  _jabber._tcp.karulf.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
  _jabber._tcp.karulf.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
  _jabber._tcp.karulf.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.