Something had gone wrong and I couldn’t change the DNS because it was showing up in somebody else’s account. After I proved ownership of the domain by adding a TXT record they fixed it and I added the hosting name servers in.
Within a few minutes the domain was hitting the server and after I edited the A record to get rid of the parking, it correctly picked up my dummy place holder index.html.
Interestingly I could only add TXT/SPF records at 123-reg.co.uk and Google’s online dig tool (shown) couldn’t pick them up.
Hiding the VPS
I decided that I’d let the main web domain take the strain from hackers trying to access the VPS. So the web game will save orders into gamedomain.org/n/orders and get results from gamedomain.org/n/results for game n. (Not the real game domain!) But behind the scenes the VPS that runs the game processing code will pull orders from that orders folder. The VPS is located elsewhere, not even in the same hosting and after processing, it will copy the results back to the relevant results folder.
This solves a couple of problems.
- Getting the orders in (and results out) requires a web interface. Because the game is based on the postal model, it’s quite feasible to keep the web interface and the processing separate.
- Increased security. If you don’t know where the VPS is located, it’s somewhat harder to hack it!
I’m also experimenting with having a web command interface. Commands get picked up pulled to the VPS and executed. For example creating a new game, pulling in game processing logs and so on.