[NCLUG] Re: Verisign are morons...

J. Paul Reed preed at sigkill.com
Thu Aug 8 15:27:17 MDT 2002


On Thu, 8 Aug 2002, DJ Eshelman wrote:

> I can see a few hours, perhaps even a day or two to release the records
> so I can use a different service (I ended up using godaddy... ho hum) for
> domain registration.  5 days past, and I began to get frustrated.  I
> emailed them and got no response.  14 days had past, and I was furious.
> I still could not register my domains elsewhere and was losing email left
> and right, not to mention the fact that all of my web services were down.

I hate to play devil's advocate here, but that was your own fault, not
Verisign's.

The majority of top-level domain sellers do this, and I for one think it's
nice. There have been a number of times at work where the stupid C*O gets
the renewal mail 6 months beforehand and it goes into a pile of
nothingness, and then 4 days after it was set to expire, they notice it and
suddenly it becomes IT's fire to put out.

As long as the domain eventually go back out onto the open market (Verisign
*did* get slapped for not doing that, IIRC), it doesn't bother me that they
hold them for a bit past the renewal time.

*You* screwed up by assuming you could immediately re-register those
domains when they expired; despite your unhappiness with Verisign, you
should've renewed them and used the proper transfer procedure to move the
domains to another top-level provider.

> 53 days later, I could finally re-register my domains elsewhere.
> Verisign is simply evil, however, and even after I registered elsewhere I
> began recieving mysterious warnings about my 'account' lapsing and of
> course offers to buy the domains BACK FROM THEM at a higher rate than I
> had originally registered with NetSol before Verisign bought them.  In
> other words, they were trying to sell me something they never really
> owned, at least by anything I ever remember signing.

I have read about this, and I agree that it's unacceptable. That's why I
use gandi.net to register my domains. One of the first lines of their
domain agreement? "You own your domainname. We simply 'advertise it' to the
Internet for you."

In my experience, they've been reliable.

> I'm not even sure of the amounts, but I'm pretty sure that my company
> gives more to Verisign every year than they give to me in salary.  And
> what do we get from them recently when we wanted to stabilize our
> firewall?  "Oh, we don't support Linux.  Goodbye."

Again, that's not really Verisign's fault.

"Trick me once, shame on you. Trick me twice, shame on me."

Either that, or you've got a C*O who refuses to listen to the people
they're paying good money to do this sort of work for them, in which case I
would personally just quit.

I can't stand companies who spend millions of dollars on Exchange servers
and the like because one VP was wined and dined by a Microsoft VP and the
rest of the IT department has to live with a decision he made while drunk
on margaritas (Luke and I were talking about this at the last meeting).

> (PS- does anyone know if there is a spell checker for Squirrelmail?)

There is; check the modules section of the SquirrelMail website.

Later,
Paul
  -----------------------------------------------------------------------
  J. Paul Reed                 preed at sigkill.com || web.sigkill.com/preed
  Wait, stop!  We can outsmart those dolphins.  Don't forget: we invented
  computers, leg warmers, bendy straws, peel-and-eat shrimp, the glory
  hole, *and* the pudding cup!  -- Homer Simpson, Tree House of Horror XI




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