Wednesday, September 20, 2000
The solid animal waste product, as they say, hit the external rotary thermal cooling unit.
My client CS called this morning about DNS problems he was having with his colo facility. I logged into the name server there and didn't see any problems; I had set things up correctly there. I checked his webserver—again, things were fine.
He then had me call the colo facility to resolve the issue.
The solid animal waste product, as they say, hit the external rotary thermal cooling unit.
Okay, technically, perhaps I should not have had access to the nameserver
there, but I did, and I saved the colo facility staff time in adding DNS
entries on behalf of my client. It might also be said I might have been
lead into believing that my client and the colo facility in question had an
arrangement and they didn't mind me adding the entries—it's not like
they would have had any difficulty in figuring out what I was doing by
checking the various logs (like utmp, wtmp and sulog for
indeed it was a Unix server) and configuration files (it seemed at one point
they fixed a typo on my part).
But it seems that in these uncertain financial times of the colo facility company any revenue is welcome and I found out that by bypassing them I was costing them $50 per domain.
PER DOMAIN!
They were charging $50 per domain to add a simple zone file to their DNS server. I told my client a few weeks before he should register his colocated box as a DNS server to the root DNS servers but he didn't follow through on it, otherwise this would have never happened.
It was shortly thereafter I learned that my access to the name server was removed. Inconvient for my client, but fortunately I had removed any reliance I had upon that nameserver.
$50 per domain. Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.
The Conner-Seattle Connection
I found out why Dad requested my email address for today I recieved email from his cousin (I think that makes him my second cousin) Walter, who works for AskMe out of Seattle.
I never knew I had family out there. Granted, I never really met much of my family on my Dad's side. But it's nice to know I have family out there if I ever decide to visit 8-)
Moving a tower
Given recent developments with my current provider, I think it is prudent to move away from them, which is really a pain (given that currently, they provide service to me gratis). I had originally thought the connection part would be hard to handle and I didn't really worry about my colocated server (a 33MHz 486SX with a ridiculous 17G harddrive).
On second thought, I may find it difficult to handle both the colocation and connectivity issues. Connectivity only because of price (of ISDN, I already have the circuit so I don't have to wait for that to be installed) or type of service (I can get DSL, but I've heard horror stories about isanely long wait times for it to be installed incorrectly, let alone correctly).
But the colocation may prove to be a bit tougher. I have plenty of options if I want to use a current webserver, but the problem there is the rather specific nature of my current Apache configuration (seeing how I have a module I wrote in there, along with some specialized email options and a couple of mailing lists.
Oi.
Moving all that to a new server will be a pain.
Ideally, I'd like to drop the server somewhere and avoid having to reconfigure a webserver, five sites, four mailing lists and one special email address. But I may have to (remember, always mount a scratch monkey).
