Bill Burcham’s memeRocket

As you may know, this site was a casualty of the recent RegisterFly meltdown. Notwithstanding some cordial emails from my ICANN Ombudsman (”… thank you for message. ICANN has forwarded your message to Registerfly and asked them to assist you.  Please let us know if they are unable to help you or if you do not hear from them in the next five days.”), and willingness but inability by the Good Guys at gandi.net to actually transfer my locked-up domains, I have felt pretty alone in this whole mess.

So I was thinking — what do you do when you’re feeling alone in the new era of social media? Why, start a website of course. Now there is already a pretty good community site, Registerflies.com where folks can commiserate and get status updates, but the itch I really want to scratch is this: how many of us out here are actually affected by RegisterFly’s failure? What actual sites are impacted? Any sites you’ve actually heard of?

Another itch that needs scratching is that there is no such thing as a “forwarding address” on the Internet when the old address is unresolvable. Makes sense right. The analogy in the real world is you have a donut shop and a nuclear blast hits it. Your customers can’t go to the old location and see the sign on the door pointing them to the new location. On the other hand, if you step outside DNS, there are myriad ways to do “forwarding address”. Only problem is, none of them have been formalized the way DNS has.

Now starting another site is a fair amount of work even for a Ninja - and I sir, am no Ninja. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a ready-made site that hosted DNS meta-data and discussion?  A site editable and usable by all.  A free site where a guy could create a forwarding address registry for just this purpose. Well as it turns out there is just such a site operated by a bunch of renaissance wierdos out of Portland, Oregon. It’s called AboutUs.org and it hosts a page about every domain on the ‘Net. There’s a page for your blog. What’s more you can edit that page - and so can everyone else. The whole thing runs on MediaWiki so you can create any old page you want!

So without further ado, I introduce the RegisterFly Impact Registry. It’s my little social experiment. I’m really curious to see if folks will come and provide their data. And I’m really curious to see just how many people, and what kinds of services were disrupted by this whole fiasco.

Well the memerocket.com domain is a casualty of the RegisterFly debacle so you’re reading this at the replacement domain meme-rocket.com. You know … the many frustrating hours wasted trying to recover ownership, and the money spent on replacement domains and domain recovery, and the time spent telling WordPress and Apache about the new name, and proving ownership to Technorati and Google, and losing my OpenID, and having my hard-won Technorati position of 84,121 slip to 2,856,595, and having to notify all my friends of the new domain wouldn’t be so bad if … come to think of it — it is so bad. Feh.

I recently had a look at a few dynamic DNS services. They each provide simple HTTP interfaces for updating the the “A” record for a host (that’s the one that maps a Fully Qualified Domain Name to an IP address). In each case you must provide credentials (username and password) as URL query parameters in the HTTP request. If you want to protect those credentials then you’ll want to use SSL by specifying the https URI scheme. With most of the services I looked at I found that https wasn’t really usable because the certificates presented by those services were not valid. In each such case, the provider was using a certificate whose subject (name) failed to match the FQDN of the actual host. Only one provider presented a working dynamic DNS service with a valid certificate. Without further ado:

Service Didn’t Work At All (http scheme)

RegisterFly

Service Did Not Present Valid Certificate (https scheme)

RegisterFly

zoneedit

Service Worked and Presented Valid Certificate

DNS Made Easy

So the big winner here is DNS Made Easy. It was the only service that offered a functioning, secure dynamic DNS service.