TechgnosisWeb Prime

Good evening, kids. Sit yourselves down and grab a cup of somethin’ warm, ’cause ol’ Uncle Katsu’s here to tell you a little story. Now, you might remember this morning, when I posted up a scathing and foul-mouthed rant against easyDNS and Liberty Cablevision. This was all in a day’s work for Uncle Katsu, as he felt he’d been grievously wronged by them folks. But it turns out Uncle Katsu was mistaken! That’s right, kids: while those Liberty varmints are, indeed, just about the nastiest, dirtiest, most low-down back-stabbin’ rattlesnakes this side of the mountains, the easyDNS folks are actually a gentle, peace-lovin’ folk who got unwittingly tangled up in Liberty’s foul schemes.

Y’see, after posting up my original rant, I was contacted by Mark, the President and CEO of easyDNS. Now, Mark could have threatened me. Hell, I wouldn’t have blamed the guy if he had, since I’d said some fair nasty things about him and his. Or he could have sent some flunky to do it for him. But no, it turns out that Mark’s a fine gentleman, and he handled the matter in a truly civil fashion. He let me know that it was all a mix-up, and, more than that, he went ahead and did the Right Thing and fixed it so’s no one else would go through the same thing I did. Now that there’s a real honest businessman, let me tell you. He’s from Canada, you know, and all those Canadian folks are sweet people. Not to mention, he’s a fine musician, who’s music you’ll all be hearing in a podcast soon.

Now, for those of you who might be curious about the technical aspects of what happened, and how Mark and his crew stepped up to the plate and did the Right Thing ™, here’s the condensed version:

Apparently, the easyDNS folk had acquired a server from managed.com, and they had set it up so that any DNS requests that were pointed at it automatically returned that “Hey, yourdomain.com is expired! Click here to renew it with easyDNS!” page. The idea, apparently, was that any domains registered with them that were expired, could be pointed at that server, and it would handle those requests. The problem arose when someone at Liberty screwed up and started pointing their client’s DNS requests over to that special server. You see, the easyDNS folk apparently never expected that someone would be dumb enough to actually point DNS requests at that machine from outside their network, so they never added in any code to check that the request actually was for a domain who’s DNS was hosted with them. But leave it to the Liberty folks to screw that up proper. From the email Mark sent me:

At least this finally explains why I was seeing all those queries for
domains that had nothing to do with us.

No matter what happens, we’re switching that IP. Can you believe…

1) the IP was originally a resolver for an access provider somewhere and
2) we setup a nameserver on it and finally
3) the nameserver we setup was a special hack that hands out the same IP
address for every query

Million-to-one shot doc, million to one.

So, it turns out that easyDNS wasn’t trying to steal anyone’s domains (unlike some registrars I could name), it was just a mix up with those incompetent varmints at Liberty pointing their DNS servers at the wrong spot. Now, mind you, Mark could have left it at that after he cleared that up, and I had corrected my previous entry, and all would have been cool. But then I get another message from the guy, which I quote below:

We added some logic so if that page gets hit by a non-member domain they
now see this:

You are here by accident

It has been brought to our attention that the IP address of this server
(205.209.153.53) is being used as a local DNS resolver by a cable or
broadband provider somewhere.

This is a mistake because this server reports the same IP for all
queries fore an internal application that has nothing to do with you.

You need to contact your access provider and get proper DNS resolvers
from them.

with no identifying markings or links for our services, etc

Nice. Now, note that last sentence there, kids. No identifying markings or links for our services. They did the Right Thing ™. Now only did they set up a special message for anyone that reached that server that wasn’t supposed to, but they went the extra mile to make sure that no one can accuse them of trying to make a quick buck off of people’s confusion, and removed all links and ads for their services from the page. This wasn’t somethin’ I asked them to do. That was somethin’ they came up with themselves. Well done, folks, very well done indeed.

So, I’ll be honest, I’ve never used easyDNS’ services. And I’m pretty happy with my current domain and DNS seervice provider. But if my experience today is any indication, Mark and the folks at easyDNS are good people, and I’m gonna go ahead and recommend them to you if you ever need some domain registration or DNS services. Do yourself a favor and check ‘em out.

Oh, and do your ears a favor and check out Mark’s band, The Parkdale Hookers. From their site:

We can best be described as AntiGlam. Take all the attributes you are supposed to associate with Rock ‘n Roll: glamour, excitement, being cool, being hip, being “in” - and get rid of it. What’s left is us. We’re like a trio of accountants who figured out a way to make Marshall stacks tax deductable and went with it.