It's Always DNS - How Deleting the Final Linode Broke Everything

I'm going to start this by saying that this is my fault for not reading the documentation. However, I'm sure this never used to be the default functionality before Linode got swallowed by Akamai.

A little while ago, I shifted my Ghost blog over to Magic Pages. I have had zero regrets so far. The service is just fantastic, and has taken the hassle of managing a Ghost install out of my hands.

This was also the last remaining compute service I had running on Linode. However, I am using their DNS Manager for multiple domains that I have registered across various places. It was nice being able to manage them all in one place. Because let's face it, some options to manage domain DNS can be shockingly bad.

After exporting the content required for migration, I completely forgot about deleting it until I received an invoice. Yesterday I finally got around to removing it. At the same time, I was making some modifications to the custom domain settings on here, ready for messing around with the ActivityPub integration. There were some oddities where following a user wasn't working as expected. I emailed Jannis with some info.

After a few hours, I realised I wasn't actually receiving any emails. There is absolutely no way I make it that long without at least one.

I use SimpleLogin for managing my alias', so went to have a look in the config in there. There were errors, lots of them. No MX records detected… That was a real moment of "Fuck".

When I went to check DNS Manager in Linode, it was now displaying a warning that you need an active compute instance for it to serve records. And to be fair to them, that is also in the documentation: https://techdocs.akamai.com/cloud-computing/docs/dns-manager#pricing-and-availability

To use DNS Manager to serve your domains, you must have at least one active Compute Instance on your account. If your account does not have any Compute Instances (because they have all been removed), DNS records will not be served.

I ended up starting a Nanode just so that it would start serving my records again while I considered what the hell to do. Things started to flow again, and emails started to come in.

I get it. They can't give everything away for free. It all requires resources. But I'm not impressed that they just flat-out don't serve any records. Perhaps a zone limit would be good. Even a warning when deleting your final remaining node would be handy.

Anyway, that's my stupid mistake for the week.