For once, I have a good excuse for not posting anything here lately. Usually I don't post for months at a time and it's just out of laziness and a lack of anything interesting to write about. I'm not saying that wasn't also the case this time, but this time I can at least pretend it was something else preventing me from posting.
Many of you noticed that thraxil.org was offline for the last month or so.
The root cause was that registerfly.com, the registrar that I'd registered my domains through, lost their ICANN accreditation for generally being sleazy. They transferred the domains in their control to a couple other registrars. Last time I renewed thraxil.org, I paid for a couple years at once to minimize the chances that it would expire on me when I wasn't paying attention. Somehow, that got lost when they transfered it and the domain expired in June, a year before I was expecting it to.
Normally, a domain expiring isn't that big a deal. ICANN gives you a 40 day grace period where the original owner is allowed to renew their domain without penalty and domain squatters can't get it. This generally works pretty well to eliminate the really predatory domain squatting. However, you can only renew the domain through the original registrar. This obviously was a problem for me. I couldn't renew it through registerfly since they were no longer accredited. Registerfly couldn't give me the transfer authorization codes that I needed to transfer the domain to a different registrar because the domain was expired. As far as I can tell, there just isn't a clear procedure in place for how to deal with the situation of an expired domain on a defunct registrar.
I won't even bother going further into what I had to do to get everything back up. Obviously it involved a lot of bureaucratic nonsense that made me want to embrace violence as a problem solving technique. There was also a round of me having to prove my identity via several easily forged tokens (screenshots of my account page? emailing a scan of my photo id? ) that didn't exactly make me feel secure with the general process.
Anyway, we're back online now so I have no more excuses.
comments
kat - Mon 23 Jul 2007 18:55:33
meow. glad it got worked out, anyway. fyi, i syndicated your blog to lj after you linked to it the other day. (out of pure laziness, i use lj as my feed-reader.) anyway, in the interest of not being a creepy internet stalker, i tell you this, and now you have mine as well. :)anders pearson - Mon 23 Jul 2007 21:08:37
I'm actually OK with creepy internet stalkers as long as they sit where I can keep an eye on them :) Now I'm back to dealing with the crappy OpenVZ based VPS that I run the site on not having enough memory to handle my weblog engine and OpenVZ being completely unable to handle the concept of swap. It's about time I moved to slicehost anyway.kat - Mon 30 Jul 2007 02:39:16
and if only it sent me e-mail notifications when you replied to my comments! ;p *rearranges monitors so you can't see me anymore* ...actually, i forgot we're playing musical desks again tomorrow. so who knows what will happen. it will be chaos!! (cats and dogs, living together...) also, why am i still online at quarter of 3 in the morning?? gah.kat - Mon 30 Jul 2007 02:44:41
aww, my asterisk-delimited action got textiled into oblivion. ==*sighs*== teach me not to read the fine print.sarah smiles - Sat 28 Jul 2007 21:49:23
The thrax is back, and that's all I worry about. My internet is missing something scary if it is gone.Jonah - Fri 27 Jul 2007 01:07:07
Welcome back! As my dear old dad likes to say, you can't win em all, but that doesn't mean you have to lose them all either.