[nzlug] XTRA: DNS challenged :-)

[Dylan Reeve]

Simon Lyall wrote:

> I think I got rid of the misspellings. They are a bad idea since it means
> an unknown percentage of customers will have the wrong settings. The best
> idea is to have a page of settings and *only* support those. Helpdesk used
> to tell customers all sorts of stupid things like "put smtp1.ihug.co.nz as
> your mail server" etc. So when smtp1 dies or gets shutdown all those
> customers broke.

Certainly understandable... I'm sure we had more 
interesting/unusual/amusing hosts in the zonefile, but that was a long 
time ago.

>> Xtra is by far the most useless ISP I have ever dealt with for DNS. I've
>> had to wait up to a week for them to action DNS changes for client
>> (don't most ISPs give you web panels for that now?) and a domain name we
>> moved away from xtra in November was (until today) still being answered
>> authoritatively by Xtra's nameserver - A problem we had nearly 10 years
>> ago when I was doing domains at Ihug.

> Were you still being billed? :-)

No, the service had definately been canceled (in fact Xtra in their zeal 
had actually deleted the entire customer account, including @xtra.co.nz 
email address, which we were still aliasing too.

> Splitting authoritative and caching servers is a good idea. That way it
> doesn't really even matter if your authoritative servers have domains they
> shouldn't really because they don't sow up in the delegation path so
> nobody will notice.

That's the weird thing - I thought Xtra did do that. But checking with 
the client revelaed their DNS setting setup for the .3 and .5 
nameservers, so that was why they couldn't get email, or their website 
(which makes customers annoyed, especially during Christmas holiday).

> It doesn't help that most people don't really know how to move a domain
> from one provider to the next but that reminds me.

Well there isn't really a right way to do it. Simply changing 
authoritative DNS should be enough, last I checked it generates emails 
to all concerned. However I've always made it a point to explicitly 
cancel service with old providers, but it seems common for authoritative 
records to remain even after billing has ceased. It's easy enough to 
slip though I guess.


-- 
Dylan Reeve


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