October 2007 Archives

Tomorrow morning personal IE domains will be made available for the first time.

We've been accepting registration requests for the last few weeks, so tomorrow morning at zero hour we will be submitting the queued requests to the IE Domain Registry.

If you haven't ordered a personal IE domain then you still have time, though obviously your choices will be more restricted if your surname is common.

For those of you who have already submitted your registration requests and sent us in the documentation you can sit back and relax. If we need anything more from you our sales team will be in touch.

Of course if there is a large volume of requests there will be delays. We've been warned by the IEDR to expect delays, so we must ask you to please be patient.

If you have any queries do not hesitate to contact our sales staff, but please bear in mind that the volume of queries may result in there being a longer delay in replies than is normal.

One of the main theme's at the ICANN meeting in Los Angeles, California, is IDN - internationalised domain names.

IDN has been a topic of much interest, discussion and debate for the last few years as currently you cannot use non-ascii characters in domain names. While that may not be an issue for an English speaker it is a problem for speakers of other languages who use other character sets.

To get an idea of what is possible have a look at the examples on the ICANN LA site.

I'm heading off to Los Angeles in the morning to attend the ICANN meeting.

I'll try to blog a bit from there either on here or on my personal blog or my domain news blog (you're spoilt for choice!).

The meeting agenda is available online.

If you're not a big fan of TLAs (three letter acronyms) then it's probably a nightmare trying to decipher the timetable.

As you can see there are meetings running from Saturday until Friday on the main timetable.

At events like this there will also be a lot of informal meetings going on all day and all night.

Some of the topics that will be on the agenda this time round include:

• Whois - since nobody can agree on this one (except that they need to do something about it) you can expect to see it on the agenda again and again


• New Gtlds - what will be the next big thing? How will ICANN decide what is allowed and what isn't?


• Translation - we live in a multilingual and multicultural world.


• Registrar Accreditation Agreement - the contract that all registrars sign with ICANN. It hasn't changed in years, so it's currently under review


• Security topics - everyone has to take an interest in security these days. It's unavoidable. ICANN includes representatives from all areas, so discussions can cover a range of topics


• Domain tasting - it doesn't seem to be down as an agenda item, but I can imagine that someone will bring it up at some point

One of the areas that ICANN has been working hard on improving is that of public participation, so you can pose questions to panels even if you are on the other side of the globe. More information can usually be found on the public participation site or the ICANN blog.

In order to further facilitate communication between us and our clients I've setup a Jaiku channel.

If you have a Jaiku account simply join the channel to receive updates from us, including the latest posts from this blog.

If you're already "connected" to me, then you won't really need to this, but there's nothing to stop you !

We've dropped the price on .eu domains for the rest of this month to a mere 5 euro!

You can place your order online via our website and your .eu will be up and running in minutes.

We've been an accredited registrar for .eu domains for the last couple of months, although we hadn't put our accreditation fully live until this morning.

The next ICANN meeting is being held in Los Angeles, California.

Although the meeting doesn't officially start until the Monday there will be meetings and events over the weekend as well.

I'll be attending again, as there are quite a few topics of interest on the table.

If you're interested in the meeting schedule, then it's available on the site.

The meeting will also include a special event in honour of Vint Cerf who has served ICANN since the beginning.

As a domain registrant you have certain rights. Unfortunately those rights can be abused by companies that don't believe in ethical business practices.

It would be nice and simple if the whois display were the same across all TLDs (ie. domain extensions), but they're not.

A basic right is for the domain to be registered to you and under your control.

That means that the domain details should show yours. For example a .ie domain registered to me shows:

status: Active
nserver: NS.BLACKNIGHTSOLUTIONS.COM
nserver: NS2.BLACKNIGHTSOLUTIONS.COM
source: IEDR

person: Michele Neylon
nic-hdl: ABG182-IEDR
source: IEDR

person: Blacknight.ie Hostmaster
nic-hdl: AAM456-IEDR
source: IEDR

For some TLDs, such as .eu the command line whois will give out varying amounts of information and you may need to go to the web based whois server to get the full details.

In either case the registrant is listed somewhere, even if the public cannot see it easily.

If the registrant wants to move their domain between registrars that is their right.

Under ICANN rules registrars are obliged to provide the EPP codes to registrants in a timely fashion (bearing in mind that you cannot transfer newly registered .com's etc., between registrars immediately)

If they want to update their domain's nameservers then they should be able to do so.

Unfortunately this does not happen.

The reality is that a disproportionate number of companies are denying registrants basic rights.

In some cases they may be doing this by accident, but in other cases it is 100% deliberate.

There is no valid reason for your web designer or developer to put their details all over your domain. None.

If you have asked your designer / developer to register a domain for you and paid them for it then it should be registered to you (which is one of the reasons why .ie domains are attractive!).

Over the past couple of years I've seen some crazy things, including a particular "registrar" that registers ALL .co.uk domains to themselves regardless of who has requested the domain.

Another company warehoused hundreds of .eu domains "on behalf" of their clients ie. in the hope that the clients would want to register the domains at some point in the future. Of course it wasn't clear if they would be charged a premium for this "service".

If a provider won't update the DNS for a domain then there is something wrong somewhere.

(If they can't update it due to the DNS not being loaded that is the registrant or their provider's issue!)

There's no good reason to delay handing over an EPP key.

If a registrant wants their co.uk domain retagged simply do it.

Why make people suffer?

Zend just sent me an email about a webinar that might be of interest to our clients:
Migrating from PHP4 to PHP5 - Presented by Ivo Jansch, CTO iBuildings

This webinar is aimed at both developers and IT managers who are still using PHP4 and considering migration to PHP5. This session will address the question, “What are the benefits of migrating to PHP5 and equally importantly, what are the risks?” Following this webinar you will be in a better position to make an informed decision between PHP4 and PHP5.

The scheduled maintenance for last night went ahead on time.

According to our engineering team most people would have been affected very briefly (less than one minute).

If anyone is experiencing issues please let us know ASAP. While everything has been tested thoroughly and we have not had any reports of issues to date there is always a possibility that someone was affected - let us know if you were.

Personally I'm overjoyed that the upgrade was finally completed, as it means that our network is a lot more resilient than previously, which means I get to sleep more soundly at night!

When: Wednesday 17th of October @ 22:30 hours

What:

Firewall Upgrade. We're moving our colocation and dedicated server
customers out from behind the current HA pair of firewalls. We've
indicated recently on our blog that we bought 4 new Cisco ASA firewalls
and the time has arrived to install them.

Who will be affected:

Both of our firewalled networks will be affected by this. Firstly
our shared hosting firewall will be moved to a new IP address on the
WAN side to facilitate VPN configurations for our colocation and dedicated customers.

Secondly the new ASAs will be put in place and they will replace the current
firewalls and access routers for these customers.

We estimate around 30 minutes to an hour to move the shared hosting firewall
and around another 30 minutes to an hour to facilitate the new firewall
install. This includes all the cabling work etc that will need to be done.

We will also allow a further hour for testing of both networks, so we're looking
at a maximum of 3 hours for this work to be completed.

Summary:

All colocation, dedicated and shared hosting customers will be affected by this outage.

I've always liked being able to support Irish companies. I don't like supporting them for the sake of it, as that's just plain silly. But if an Irish company offers a product or service that is excellent, then I have no qualms about recommending it to my friends and to our clients and partners.

Why wouldn't I?

That's the case with Infacta.

They're based in Sligo, in the west of Ireland, which is well away from Dublin and the other urban centres of Ireland. Yet they've built up a really cool suite of software and services that help companies communicate with their clients. Although I use Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X for a lot

Group Surveys is a really cool online survey tool. It might not be free, but there's nothing wrong with paying for a quality service, is there? However if you're a Blacknight client you can get some free credits to get you started. How's that?

What can it do?

It's a versatile and easy-to-use application for conducting online surveys. You can create online surveys in minutes using custom designs and multiple question and answer types. A link to your survey can be placed in your website, blog or e-mail, making distribution simple and flexible.

If you want to get started follow this link to the "special" Blacknight page. Happy surveying!

We mentioned the pending "death" of php4 some time ago.

It now seems that some people have got together to help push the move to php5 forward and have set a deadline of sorts.

The "go php5" site lists software projects that support php 5.2 and greater natively ie. without "dirty hacks" or any other messing about.

As I mentioned previously, most scripts should work properly under php 5, but there will always be exceptions!

If you'd like to find out more about why switching to php5 makes sense have a look at their FAQ.

The idea behind this is to give people that extra "push":

PHP version 5 adds a number of new features and design changes that make developing robust, secure, feature-rich software faster and easier. Those features do not exist in older versions of PHP 4, however, and many are very hard to emulate. Such features include fast and easy XML support for improved web services, better timezone handling, vastly improved database tools and input tools to make PHP applications more secure, and many others.

Projects that support PHP 4 cannot make use of those newer features, however. That means projects have to choose between supporting PHP 4, which has been in maintenance-only mode for over three years, or enabling modern web applications and services. For a long time many projects have chosen to support PHP 4 because of the large number of web hosts running PHP 4. Unfortunately that has resulted in a "chicken and egg" problem where web hosts have no incentive to upgrade to PHP 5, which means PHP developers can't use PHP 5's new functionality even if they want to.

By announcing that many leading open source projects will drop legacy support for PHP 4 at a fixed later date, we believe we can break that cycle and encourage web hosts to upgrade and allow open source developers to build faster, more secure, more powerful web applications.

Now if only we could persuade people to stop using MS SQL 2000 and FrontPage!!

Sorry for the delay in providing this report regarding the last network issue

Date: October 7th 2007
Timeline: 02:15 - 03:35am (Irish time)

Affected Customers: Any customer on the shared firewall that has a dedicated server or has colocation with us was affected during this incident.
This also included our shared hosting clients.

What happened?

At around 2:15am on Sunday 7th of October a segment of our main network was sluggish and people would have experienced latency and packet loss.

Why?

As you may know our main network is firewalled. We have a pair of firewalls setup in HA (high availability) to protect the bulk of our clients, which includes all our shared hosting clients on both windows and linux, as well as a large number of clients on dedicated servers or with colocated machines.

Similar to the events of September 11 this year this was mostly because the firewalls we're using have 100meg ports and as such are easily flooded by this simple attacks. We've already put the wheels in motion to upgrade these and we hope to announce the upgrade at the end of this week.

A brief timeline of events is shown below.

02:15: Alerted that sites on the network are not reachable.
02:20: A check reveals that any site behind the shared firewall is
not accessible.
02:30: A reboot of the firewalls is not successful in getting a
response. so an engineer is dispatched to Dublin
03:30: A check by the Engineer on site indicate that one customer
box is sending out masses of UDP traffic. The firewall is attempting to stop all the traffic at the cost of bring down everything else includingthe local console.
03:35: The customer port is disabled and the firewall becomes responsive
again.

As some of you know I have been writing a column for PC Live for the last couple of years.

This month's edition just arrived, so I thought I might as well republish it here.

Download file (pdf)

Last night around 2am (Irish time) we experienced a network issue that affected some parts of our network.

All services were returned to normal as soon as possible.

We will issue a full report on last night's incident as soon as I have had an opportunity to discuss it with our network engineers.

In the meantime I would just like to apologise for any inconvenience caused to any affected clients.