[conspire] Re: penlug DNS seems to be down...

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bill Ward (bill at wards.net):

> That's right.  And the domain registration too.  Joker has a pretty
> good system whcih works quite well, except for this recent outage.  I
> trust they will find a fix that will prevent the same in the future,
> so I'll give them another chance.  The main problem was that the
> joker.com nameservice was dead, so the joker.com nameservers didn't
> resolve.  Glue records would have fixed that.  If you don't mind, I'd
> like to forward your detailed analysis to them...?

Of course, you're very welcome to.  It'd probably be best if you elide
my editorial comments about laziness and lack of professionalism,
though.  ;->

Honestly, there shouldn't have been any way for all three of their
nameservers to cease functioning -- unless perhaps they somehow allowed
their _own_ domain registration, i.e., their registration of joker.com,
to enter the expiration 75-day period, or get hijacked, or be the
subject of serious administrative errors?  That would be a supremely
embarrassing thing for a domain registrar to allow to happen to itself.

It's a little difficult to tell, but looking at the whois record for
"joker.com" _is_ consistent with that theory.  It has:

$ whois joker.com | more
[Querying whois.internic.net]
[Redirected to whois.joker.com]
[Querying whois.joker.com]
[whois.joker.com]
domain:       joker.com
organization: CSL Computer Service Langenbach GmbH
email:        admin at joker.com
address:      Hansaallee 191-193
city:         Duesseldorf
postal-code:  40549
country:      DE
phone:        +49 211 867670
admin-c:      admin at joker.com#1
tech-c:       admin at joker.com#1
billing-c:    hostmaster at joker.com#0
reseller:     CSL Computer Service Langenbach GmbH              
reseller:     Duesseldorf, Germany                              
reseller:     Visit www.joker.com to get Domains                
nserver:      a.ns.joker.com 194.176.0.2
nserver:      b.ns.joker.com 194.245.101.19
nserver:      c.ns.joker.com 194.245.50.1
status:       lock
created:      1994-11-27 00:00:00 UTC
modified:     2005-12-08 16:07:48 UTC
expires:      2007-08-03 11:02:10 UTC
[...]

Something happened to joker.com's own domain records on 2005-12-08.  
I can't tell what that was, at this date.  You might ask them, and see
what they have to say.

> One other important feature that Joker offers is web and email
> forwarding.  I use this to get all my email routed to my gmail
> account, and gmail's "Accounts" feature to have my outgoing mail
> appear to come from my own domains.  I also use the Web forwarding so
> that certain domain/host names redirect the user to the canonical Web
> address for the site.  Both features require using Joker-hosted DNS,
> which alas means that providing my own secondary DNS is not possible.

I'm not sure that follows:  In the regular model, the one "primary"
server is where the hostnames are maintained, and all of the "secondary"
servers automatically reflect the exact contents of what is at the
primary site (using an update mechanism called "zone transfers").

Thus, using Joker-hosted DNS should not preclude also having additional
non-Joker nameservers reflecting the Joker-defined zone contents.