[conspire] What happens when ... DNS ...

[Rick Moen]

I wrote:

> > Do not presume malice for that which can be explained by incompetence[1]
> 
> Possibly you missed my own explicit invocation of Hanlon's Razor (in my
> initial post to Mark Olson et al.).
> 
> Even in my sharpest-worded (and latest) response, I didn't claim anyone
> was lying.  I merely said that x7hosting's claim (that this all is a
> domain registration) makes no sense and is a bit pathetic.

Ah, I see what you're reacting to:  My latest (most sharply worded)
forward _did_ bear for Conspire reader the Subject header 'What happens
when your hosting provider has zero regard for truth'.  (That was _not_
part of antecedent offlist converstion with Mark Olson, Edie Stern, and
Joe Siclari.)

Since I'd already invoked Hanlon's Razor (upthread) to all and sundry, I
didn't feel I needed to further belabour the 'Well, they _could_ just be
clueless on a truly epic scale' possibility -- especially after this....

   I spoke to X7hosting and gave them Rick's analysis.  They came back (a
   couple days later) and said it was a domain registration problem. 

Yeah, wow.  I'm normally eager to apply the principle of charity, but
the quoted text makes that difficult.  For this latest quotation (or at
least paraphrase) to be an honest mistake, the Internet hosting company
in question would need to greatly misunderstand what registration of
Internet domains _does_ -- in other words, labour under serious
misconceptions about the foundations of their business (misconceptions
that by a serendipitous coincidence enables them blaming someone else
for their own screwups).  That's physically possible but, yeah, wow, I
really don't believe it.

One of the meta-lessons I was trying to pass along to Mark Olson, Edie
Stern, and Joe Siclari is that DNS problems can be tracked down and
their root cause identified _by anyone_, using standard tools.  The
point of my whois / dig transcript was 'Here, these three problems can
be observed by anyone, objectively, and all of them are provably
occurring at x7hosting.'

For x7hosting to read a copy of my analysis and respond that it's a
domain registration problem, and for that to be an honest answer,
requires that they both fail to comprehend my analysis and fail to
comprehend domain registration.  That's quite a bit of curiously
selective learning disability, for an Internet hosting company.

Remember, too, that this is x7hosting's second swing at the problem,
where the first response they gave Mark, Edie, and Joe was 'This has to
be a local issue - change your DNS.'

Epic comprehension fail or sleazy cop-out?  You decide.