NO CARRIER

I set up a twitter for my aion toon. I think I should go to bed.

lowscan

What else can you do when you are waiting on a rift…

I am going to be in London for the Dragon Age launch. Maybe this will hold me over on the plane:

Dragon Age Journeys.

Gamespot preview focusing on mages, my default RPG class.

Dragon Age Updated Preview – Rage of Mages – PC Previews at GameSpot.

Checking out some new dragon age stuff while waiting on hold. Thought I would make a post of it.

Well. It has been a long day. I awoke this morning dealing with a major network outage. Once that passed, I settled into my normal routine of fixing Linux problems. While dumping some 80G of databases, I figured I would get a head start on my migration. I am moving blacknode.net to slicehost, so my first order of work was cleaning up and migrating my zones to slicehost’s nameservers. No big deal there.

Now here is where the trouble starts. For some reason I cannot recall, I used register.com as blacknode’s registrar 3 years ago when I sniped the domain from some German quake 2 gaming clan. After a few minutes of remembering my login credentials, I was there, looking at there root nameserver editing tool. I double checked my work and entered the new nameservers. I clicked submit.

I have walked customers through this process THOUSANDS of times. webmasters and ecommerce noobs have a stigma attached to all things DNS. The words TTL and root NS records seem to go hand in hand with 24-48 hours of downtime. The average domain owner also seems dread making changes at the registrar level; especially when register.com is involved. After todays experience, I think I finally understand why.

For some reason my dns changes would not stick. The interface simply said that the change failed and that I should try again. I did so, and still no go. The register.com website gloats about its amazing call center support. I think this is how they justify being the most expensive registrar on the planet.

So after the receptionist, who politely told me my estimated hold time (5 minutes), I was connected to a techie type who seemed to know what this crazy DNS thing was, or at least new what words to throw around. She went through the dns change process that I had just went through and verified that my dns servers we up and answering queries but ran into the same problems I did. She got me into a ticket and escalated the problem to a tech with access to the backend.

This was around 3:30pm.

I checked the status of my ticket by querying the whois database for register.com. After about an hour, I noticed something very wrong:

DNS Servers:

dns234.c.register.com
dns249.d.register.com
dns073.b.register.com
dns134.a.register.com

It seems that the annonymous technician was able to reset my domains root nameserver record to the default for register.com. I hoped this was a temporary thing, so I waited for about 5 minutes before getting worried. I attempted to alter the record to point to the slicehost nameservers again, but no dice. I tried to put it back to what I had initially, fail.

You see, I migrated my zone from Rackspace nameservers. The zone happily resolves on both slicehost dns and rackspace dns. So not being able to change it was not a problem, as long as the the records stayed what it had been for the last 3 years. It was about 4:30.

So I called up again. Same procedure, I had a ticket number, but the techie still had to jump through the hoops. I was ensured that my issue was being addressed by the highest escalation point available and that they would get to the bottom of the issue. They seemed to believe that the problem existed upstream somewhere, unfortunaitly, those guys live on the east coast, and are 9-5.

While on hold, I began adding the important records to the register.com dns servers. It seems that the original ip I had hosted blacknode.net on was still present on register’s nameservers with a TTL of about 14400 seconds. The ip was a dynamic address used on a residential broadband network. So i ended up caching this on my local dns…

So I was effectively down. Not that this cheesy blog gets allot of traffic. Or like I make money off this site. But if I did, I am sure I would be pissed.

The techie got back on the phone after about 15 minutes and said that they could not resolve the issue without the real technicians who only worked daywalker hours.

I think I will be transferring my domain elsewhere. Godaddy seems to be it.

~

Freaky Dwarf Character

Dragon Age: Origins

Over the next few weeks, I plan on making an honest effort towards the design of the blacknode.net website. The website will contain projects and articles related to the current interests of the Blacknode Network.

The initial design focus will be on graphics and branding. A logo is already in the works, but graphic art has never been one of my strengths. I have not decided on the logic portion of the site. I know it will be MySQL driven, but I have not decided on a specific language. I am leaning towards python though, but I am not sure I need a full MVC framework, such as django or plone/tg2.

Any readers interested in contributing to the early development stages, drop me a line. The site will publish various articles submitted by users. So feel free to submit papers as well.

~JR