Android Tip: Search Settings

This is the first of what I hope to be several tech tips, as I discover them, or tips for things I use on a daily basis.

This one came out of a podcast I was listening to, which I highly recommend, called Phones Show Chat. It can be found at Steve Litchfield’s Site.

They were talking about a setting in Android being hidden deeply in menus, so you had to go way down to find it. The setting in question was Pulse Light Notification. The Co-host, Ted Salmon was talking about this setting being buried deep in menus.

Something I use every day in Android, is the Search Settings feature. This can be found if you open Settings, then look towards the top right of the screen. I don’t know what it looks like visually, but Talkback, my screen reader, says Search Settings. If you tap that, you get a search box where you can start typing a setting. When I typed “Not” without the quotes, the first search item at the top of the screen was, you guessed it, Pulse Light Notification.

I highly recommend anyone who wants to get round settings in Android quickly, use this method, as it is sometimes quicker than clicking down several levels of menu items.

I hope this helps.

What Is DNS Recursion And Why Should I care?

Hello and welcome to an occasional post from me, as a direct result of my working life, and some tech tips I come up with now and again to fix things.

DNS recursion is one of those things I came across when moving my web site from an in-house server to a cloud-based much faster server at Vultr, whom I highly recommend if you want a dedicated virtual private server.

I use a Windows-based DNS (Domain Name System) server called Simple DNS. I have used it for years, but only in-house.

When I moved, I got a new IP address for my cloud-based server, as you would. I then found that oddly, some devices, Emma’s Galaxy S5 was one, would not load any web sites, instead giving an error, something to the effect of bad domain config, or DNS Probe Failed, or other such errors.

I was racking my little brain for a couple of weeks over this. I had written to JH Software, the developers of SimpleDNS for support and they had made a couple of suggestions, which didn’t fix the problem. What was odd though is that newer devices like my Nexus 6P and Angie’s iPhone were going on the web with no problem, but maybe a bit slow.

It seemed that telling my router to use Google’s open DNS servers, which do allow recursion, 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 would work, even for the Galaxy S5, but when I pointed to my own IP address as the primary DNS server from my router, then the S5 couldn’t get out when connected to our wi-fi.

Eventually, I got it. It was DNS recursion. As a security measure, recursion should be disabled on your own DNS server, other than for clients from your own IP address. If recursion is not available to you, then you won’t reach many web sites.

For an explanation of DNS Recursion, please read this article I found here:-

SimpleDNS Recursion

The solution was to go into Tools, Options in SimpleDNS go down to the option called Recursion in the DNS branch and enable recursion from non-local IP addresses, but only for trusted IP’s then add your ISP’s public IP address allocated to you.

I hope this helps some network server admins scratching their heads if they run a DNS server and wondering why they can’t get out on all devices.

New Year, New Things!

Hi all and a very Happy New Year to you.

The purpose of this post is just to let you know that we are migrating to a new web server for all the domains belonging to comproom. Hopefully, this means no difference for you, except that the web site should be a lot faster.

Please bear with us though, if you do get any teething issues, but more importantly, please do report them to us from the contact page.

Many thanks for all your business last year and may we wish you all a wonderful New Year.

From Angie, Steve and Emma.