[NCLUG] Re: Verisign are morons...

[DJ Eshelman]

Thus spake "J. Paul Reed" <preed at sigkill.com>
>> 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.

Yes... and no.  The fact that I requested them to release the 
domain is VERY DIFFERENT from if I had just in ignorance let the domain slip.  They simply 
refused to release it, which is pretty darn evil.

> *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.


*I* screwed up by ever renewing with 
Verisign when they took over NSI.  The 'proper transfer procedure' invloves a charge that is 
DOUBLE what it costs me for an entire year.  By the time I knew that, it was too late anyway.  I'd 
already lost the client.

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

Again, yes 
and no- Verisign bought a company that did, and now they don't.  You can see where they sit pretty 
obviously from that, I think.

> 
> "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.

Well, there's more to it than that I'm sure- we deal with a lot of very picky clients 
that may requre certain procedures and firewalls to be in place.  I'm on the 'bottom rung' as 
far as that stuff is concerned- but it pisses me off when we're locked into something like this- 
remember the analogy of buying a car with the hood welded shut?  That's what this has become for 
us.

> 
> 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).

Oh, yeah, that sucks.  But we don't use 
Exchange, never will.  We will be trying out some LDAP stuff, but I'm not sure how far we'll take 
it- right now the view of the CIO is that centralized stuff like this takes up network 
resources.  Before you scream "build a faster network!" know that we really do stress out our 
switches because our datacenter has more hosts than both of our offices.  The user network has 
'hand me down' switches.  Nuff said?  But the bottom line is that a lot of C*Os don't think about a 
lot of stuff like this, and do get cornered by swift talking, drink buying salesmen.  It's the 
cards we're dealt.  Thankfully I work for a company that is embracing Linux in a big way- we're 
hoping to have some of our users even using Linux full time soon, so it's expanding even beyond 
the 

> 
>> (PS- does anyone know if there is a spell checker for Squirrelmail?)
> 
> 
There is; check the modules section of the SquirrelMail website.

I must just be an idiot 
or something- I'm not seeing it.  Oh well- I don't have complete control over the binaries for 
this system anyway- my host uses the Ensim Control Panel server, so it allows things like this 
but you can't really do anything with it unless you request it of them.

have a good one, 
everyone!

-DJ