Thursday·11·September·2008

deuxchevaux.org is back //at 00:11 //by abe

from the It's-always-good-to-have-DSL-in-the-holiday-cottage dept.

My primary e-mail domain deuxchevaux.org was offline for one and a half week due to my (former) domain provider Korypet went bankrupt and probably hadn’t paid the registrar’s invoice for deuxchevaux.org although I had paid Korypet’s invoice. (The domain wasn’t expired. Its expiration date was somewhen in 2009.)

Korypet itself just told its customers (and told it only on request) that they a) will shut down their business because it doesn’t pay off and that b) their service won’t be as good as usual since their head is currently in hospital. I should have noticed that there is something fishy and some details were missing at lastest when they told customers (also only on request) that they have to shut down some services earlier than announced because one of their providers has terminated their agreement with Korypet at short notice. I also should have expected that they couldn’t keep their promise to continue domains and DNS until May 2009 as they couldn’t keep other promised grace periods.

I’m quite sad about how Korypet went down and how bad blood they caused — not only for me — since they offered not only good services for money but also had really good (and personal) support. But I guess that this quality at very low prices was also one of the reasons why they couldn’t keep up their business for longer.

I had one of their UML based, low-end virtual “VD” servers for about six years, and used it as secondary DNS server and IRC client host. I also often thought about getting a second one at some other geographical location (they offered virtual servers in three German cities).

That was the reason why I started to move my domains to them a while ago. They even could fully answer me domain registration questions for which the eDNS and the Hetzner staff only had partial and therefore confusing answers.

Since it was the easiest way, I tried to transfer the domains I had registered with Korypet to the B2C division of their registrar Key Systems, to DomainDiscount24. The web interface isn’t as bad as the name “DomainDiscount24” suggests, but they seem to have communication problems if – as in this case – more than one of their business divisions are involved. It took at least two phone calls until they did the all the necessary things to get the domains transferred from Korypet’s business customer account to my newly created end customer account although they have a special form for former Korypet customers.

Domains I registered after Korypet stopped accepting new domains (well, they just didn’t answer on my domain registration requests anymore) I have registered via eDNS which was a recommendation form someone on the DaLUG mailing list.

My conclusion after these hassles: No more domain registration resellers, only directly interacting with registrars. Never register all domains at the same company. Have more than two DNS servers at different hosters. Don’t have domain registrations and DNS servers at the same company.

So I now register my domains either at DomainDiscount24 or at eDNS. And .ch domains of course directly at SWITCH. (If only all domain registrations would be so simple and uncomplicated as with SWITCH!) And my DNS servers are currently hosted at x|encon in Hannover (Yes, it’s a Xen DomU :-) and Hetzner in Erlangen. And a third one in Switzerland is already planned.

Filed under: Blogging is futile » English » Computer » deuxchevaux.org is back
Tagged as: bankrupt, DNS, domain, DomainDiscount24, DomU, eDNS, Hetzner, Key-Systems, Korypet, register, reseller, UML, vd-server, xen, xencon
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Sunday·10·June·2007

.org registration rules arbitrariness //at 00:36 //by abe

from the Passierschein-A38 dept.

For about nine years, my domain deuxchevaux.org was hosted (which means web, DNS and a catchall e-mail forward) by Internett at Saarbrücken. Although it was a sponsered hosting without much support I was quite happy with their service. But especially my ideas and demands regarding spam filtering grew out of the possibilities of a mass hosting solution. Since I run my own web, mail and name servers for a while now, it was no question that also deuxchevaux.org should become self-hosted.

Since I run a root-server at Hetzner and their “robot” also offers domain handling, I planned to transfer deuxchevaux.org to them. Therefore I first had to register my two DNS servers (sym.noone.org and virt.noone.org) with them. In the documentation there was a note that for .org domains, name servers in a .org domain have to be registered with the same registrar. And just a few hours after registering the name servers via their web interface I got a mail from Hetzner Support that the domain of my name servers are not registered with Hetzner and so I cannot use them form .org domains. Asking for the cause of this rule, I got the answer that this is a rule by Hetzner’s upstream registrar, Cronos AG.

Well, since I don’t understand such arbitrarily looking rules, I was looking around for another registrar with usable web interface. On the DaLUG mailing list, someone recommended eDNS. Since their single user account is free of setup and monthly fees, I signed up with them and started playing around with their web interface. When I tried to transfer deuxchevaux.org using the Auth-Code, I got the response that the transfer failed and when I clicked on “Details”, I got “$VAR1 = [];” as detailed information about the failure. Data::Dumper says hello. I wrote them and asked if they can tell me, what that should mean last Thursday and got no answer so far. I don’t think, I’ll register domains with them anymore.

So where to try it now? Someone recommended GoDaddy, but I neither like their website (way too much targeted on beginners and mainstream) nor do I want to apply for a credit card or a PayPal account to be able to pay their bills.

So a bill from my UML hoster Korypet (aka VD Server) caught my eye: They were lowering prices for registrations at some top level domains (and in comparison to the recent lowerings at eDNS the new prices also apply to existing contracts) including .at and .org (and I only have .at, .ch and .org domains). I didn’t knew they also do domains outside of selling them in packages with UML hosts. So I wrote to Korypet support, if they offer a web interface for domain handling and got a reply less than two hours later: Not yet, but they’re working on it. Until then, I can request domain handling tasks by e-mail to their support. Since I know their UML managing web interface – which works fine – and since I’m happy with their support, service and prices since years (I’m customer there since 2003), I replied with all the necessary data for the transfer.

Well, the transfer failed, too. But in comparsion to Hetzner or eDNS, they made the effort to exactly find out, what happened. So what did happen? The rule which the Hetzner support guy told me that it was from their upstream registrar wasn’t from there but from Public Internet Registry (PIR) itself. And the rule seems to match not that often, so that many people involved in domain registration don’t know about it (and usually neither understand its existence when they hear about it). Also I have no understanding for this harassment and so I felt the strong urge to get one over on them.

Korypet suggested several solutions fitting my needs (i.e. the usage of my DNS servers for my domains). They even offered A records under some of their PIR registrered domains pointing to the IP addresses of my DNS servers for no fee, but luckily some A records under my own .ch domain sufficed.

So the transfer was successful on Friday evening, 6pm local time, my own mail server (running Postfix) was happily rejecting a lot of spam to (and even from) non-existing users (which came in over the catch-all before) as well as hosts greeting with not fully qualified or invalid HELOs and greylisting others via David Schweikert’s Postgrey. The number of accepted mails and recognized spam sunk immediately by approximately factor four on the whole mail server, although deuxchevaux.org isn’t the only domain that receives mail there (but was the only one which had a catch-all before).

So in the long run, I’ll probably move all .org and .at domains over to Korypet since they have not only fair prices but also a competent and individual support. (And yes, this is a recommendation. ;-)

Filed under: Blogging is futile » English » Computer » dot-org registration rules arbitrariness
Tagged as: .ch, .org, Arbitrariness, DaLUG, Data::Dumper, deuxchevaux, DNS, Domain, eDNS, Greylisting, Hetzner, Internett, Korypet, noone, Odyssee, Perl, PIR, Postfix, Postgrey, Public Internet Registry, TLD, UML, Willkür, WTF
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Tuesday·27·March·2007

New virtual home //at 01:36 //by abe

from the Moving dept.

There were quite a lot of small changes in my personal e-mail, web server and DNS infrastructure during the last months. While for more than ten years all my mails came together on a Linux account at the Students Representatives of Computer Science (German: Fachschaftsrat Informatik, short: FS Info) at the University of Saarland and all but one domain was hosted at my former employer, now nearly everything (including this blog) has moved to a Hetzner root server run by me and some friends and running Debian Sarge for AMD64. Most of these moves happend divided in small steps during January and February this year.

Only one move happend a little earlier than expected: Without any notice all external mail to my FS Info account got lost in a black hole one hop in front of the FS Info mail server. It looks like the RBG of the Dept. of CS at the University of Saarland didn’t like my face —eh— mails anymore and just dropped them. No bounces, no notices. Not that I knew them as friendly and kind, but blackholing active e-mail accounts without notice leads to dismissal at other places. They should really go and hear alphascorpii’s BOFH talk.

So my long-time e-mail address abe@fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de is no more valid and any mail there won’t get read or answered. But I don’t mind if you send any junk there, it’s not my job anymore.

For luck the hoster of my deuxchevaux.org domain, Internett, which I used for all non-university e-mail, changed the forward within a good hour, so I only lost incoming mails of about one and a half day (which was the time until I noticed the blackholing), namely most mails written to all of my addresses at 30th and 31st of January 2007. If you wrote me around that time and miss the answers, you now know why. The few people I expected mail from, already have been contacted.

So for the future, write emails only to abe@ either deuxchevaux.org or — if you can’t remember how to spell that (no, you’re not the only one ;-) — noone.org (“no one” as in “nobody”, not “no. one” as in “the best” ;-)

And so since then none of my coworkers can make fun of me because I don’t have root on the box where my mail is received. ;-)

One of the moves also gave me the possibility to get “my own” Jabber server, so the time with those two jabber addresses (abe@jabber.noxa.de and abe@amessage.de), where usually at least one had some problems with some gateways are also over. If you want to contact me using Jabber, use abe@noone.org, equal to my easier to remember e-mail address. ;-)

So there’s still left to move: web, mail and DNS of deuxchevaux.org and beckert.at (domain of my parents) and my old web pages on fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de as well as Planet Symlink. And of course the redesign of my web pages, which I’ve planned since more than a half decade… ;-)

The infrastructure in my real-life home also changed: My gateway to the world is now a 266 MHz MIPS based ASUS WL500g Premium (which I named “pluriel” after the multifunctional Citroën C3 Pluriel) running FreeWRT 1.0.1 which replaced tryane, an as noisy (power supply fan) as compact Unisys Aquanta CP mini-desktop with a passively cooled 200 MHz Pentium MMX.