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Recently Mark Jeftovic posted a good discussion on where he, and his company EasyDNS, draw the line. He will allow the expression of extreme opinions by anyone. But actually condoning violence against an identifiable group is not allowed. This is a defensible, libertarian opinion.

Saying "There are consequences for messing with us...We will take revenge." crosses the line. If Cloudflare knowingly enables them, that's bad.

Why should he registrar be responsible for content?

Because they have made themselves responsible through their Acceptable Use Policy agreement. For example, EasyDNS includes these conditions upon the registree:

• The Applicant warrants to easyDNS that the details submitted by the Applicant to easyDNS are true and correct, and that future modifications or additions to those details will be true and correct.
• The Applicant agrees not to use the services provided by easyDNS to conduct any business or activity or solicit the performance of any activity that is prohibited by law.
• easyDNS reserves the right to revoke any or all services associated with a domain or user account, for policy abuses. What constitutes a policy abuse is at the sole discretion of easyDNS and includes (but is not limited to) the following:
  • transmitting Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE)
  • transmitting bulk email
  • posting bulk Usenet articles
  • Denial of Service attacks of any kind
  • copyright infringement
  • unlawful or illegal activities of any kind (this includes Ponzi schemes and HYIPs)
  • promotes net abuse in any manner (providing software, tools or information which enables net abuse)
  • causing lossage or creating service degradation for other easyDNS users whether intentional or inadvertent.
  • Is listed in the DNS Providers' Blacklist or in any other blacklist / RBL which easyDNS may reference.

Emphasis mine. And even more interesting:

• No Protection for Abusers: Domains and user accounts determined by easyDNS to be in violation of our Terms of Service are not entitled to privacy protection....

The City of London was well within reason to ask them to look at whether one of their users was violating their terms, and all they had to do was say "no".

EasyDNS does have an API for "Dynamic" IP addresses.

Their clients are listed here: http://support.easydns.com/dyndns.php

And the API is here:
http://support.easydns.com/tutorials/dynamicUpdateSpecs.php
IMarv.

EasyDNS does have an API for "Dynamic" IP addresses.

Their clients are listed here: http://support.easydns.com/dyndns.php

And the API is here:
http://support.easydns.com/tutorials/dynamicUpdateSpecs.php
IMarv.

Another to add to your list:

EasyDNS. Also not the cheapest, but I've used them for years with absolutely no complaints. A few of years ago, they sent a hugely apologetic email stating that their technical support department was unavailable for one hour during the time period when the entire east coast was without power. DNS service, however, was unaffected.

EasyDNS is $25 per year.

That being said this is not an uncommon issue these days at DNS providers across the 'net. Before anyone starts to kick and scream about how EveryDNS is handling things, remember that these attacks can get astoundingly vicious.

No amount of "clue" or mitigation or whatnot will help when the upstream service providers themselves are having trouble with the traffic load from a large-scale botnet attack.

We are in the similar situation having Exchange in-house behind a (quite stable) DSL line. Thankfully the DSL has been out only about 30 minutes total in our first year, but unfortunately our Exchange server can't say the same. We've gotten an amazing value using a backup mx service, which silently queues mail for us until our server returns. It works amazingly well-- once our server is back up, the queued mail comes flowing in. Its a beautiful thing.

We specifically use EasyDNS's DNS service which includes the backup MX service. We use their DNS Plus service which only costs about $40/year, and allows us to use their CLUSTER of backup MX servers (How cool is that!?)! Its also available on their DNS-only service (~$20/yr). I don't work for EasyDNS (just a happy customer). You can also get the same service from lots of other places as well.

Realistically, I think you need to use an external DNS service to do this for network outages (since other mail servers will need access to your domain's MX records to find to the backup MX servers). For us, this meant we needed to use a different DNS server inside our local network. The external dns points people to our mail server's public IP. The internal dns points to our internal ips.

Another note, we use PFSense as our firewall (great product!). Recently, I think I saw support for NAT Reflection was added (allowing internal machines to contact internal servers using a public IP address), which might negate the need for the "split" dns described above. Haven't tried that yet, though.

This happened to EasyDNS a while back. They ended up moving part of their DNS infrastructure behind Prolexic, which appears to have helped.

Prolexic is the brainchild of Barrett Lyon, who seems to have some experience fighting DDoS attacks. I'd be interested to see how well Prolexic's service actually works, but it seems technically sound to me.

I am sure people have good reason to get angry about their vendor if stuff like this happens. However, the poster is right in saying that you get what you pay for. If you are the type that thinks he can cut corners and believe the glossy advertising, than you cannot really complain to slashdotters about it.

If you want a good service just use easydns http://www.easydns.com./ They only do DNS and therefore actually know what they are doing.

The former webmaster was using frontpage to post stuff and doesn't have a valid control panel login ... The problem is a couple of uears ago, someone registered the domain for 5 years. The person who registered it is long gone, and I can't get ahold of them to change the DNS entries.

Sounds like a class act organization! What's your number in case I get rear-ended?

Transferring the domain should be as easy as initiating a transfer with another registrar (which will usually give tack a year on the existing expiration), assuming you have access to the admin contact in the WHOIS (If not, you'll probably have to contact the current registrar to get it changed to something valid). However, if you're currently hosting your DNS with said provider, you'll also have to transfer your DNS records (probably manually) to the new registrar or to different nameservers. Transerring to a different host should be as easy as signing up and pointing your DNS to their servers, asuming you still have control of your DNS and that hasn't been lost in the shuffle also.

If you want to simplify it all, you might consider transferring everything to a registrar that provides domain registration, DNS hosting, and web hosting (make sure they have PHP and your other requirements). Then you have one contact for support (make sure it's a reputable one though).

Ask for domains, DNS hosting, and web hosting in one package. Look/ask around to make sure they're not some fly-by-night POS. eNom offers domain registration, DNS hosting, and web hosting under one roof, and they've been around forever.

I have had excellent experiences with http://easydns.com/.

Not only do they offer just about any DNS-related service you can think of (including dynamic DNS, using standard clients for any OS), but also provide fall-back mail spooling, great management tools, convenient and honest domain registration and EXCELLENT customer service.

I have been using their services since 1999, and can honestly say that despite EasyDNS not being priced quite as low as some other services, I prefer the convenience, great service, features and peace of mind to saving a few bucks.

FWIW, EasyDNS has supported adding TXT records to your DNS entry for a few months now.

They're a little more expensive than the other DNS service providers out there, but they provide backup MX servers, and I haven't had a single problem with them in 2 years.

And no, I don't work for them, nor am I a member of their affiliate program.

I have my own domain and I pay a 3rd party, EasyDNS, to handle my DNS. They support SPF... I just type some info into a textbox in the web-based management console and it works! If your DNS provider doesn't support SPF then they probably aren't very tech savvy... and that isn't an attribute I'd like in a DNS provider.

I have my own domain and I pay a 3rd party, EasyDNS, to handle my DNS. They support SPF... I just type some info into a textbox in the web-based management console and it works! If your DNS provider doesn't support SPF then they probably aren't very tech savvy... and that isn't an attribute I'd like in a DNS provider.

EasyDNS also supports SPF.

EasyDNS also supports SPF.

When my ISP (Aliant) started blocking port 25, it really screwed me up for a day or so (before I realized what was going on), but luckily my DNS registrar (EasyDNS) allowed me to be flexible and set my MX record to send mail to a different (unblocked) port.

As long as your registrar has a similar ability, you should be OK. They have a handy tutorial, which might prove helpful.

easydns is hands-down the best one I've used (except for the "old days" then netsol was the only game in town for \.[com|org|net]).

as the name implies, they do DNS as well.

absolutely awesome support. extremely functional web admin. never-fail uptime.

some perks for the whole shebang (reg + dns) include them being a backup MX host, more mail goodies (if you need them to do some forwarding) and DDNS support.

<joke>it's a shame they're canadian</joke>

Why do you seek to portray Verisign as such a sleazy company?

If you ever had a domain with them, you'd think they're sleazy too.

I spent months trying to transfer a domain away from them, and when I finally thought I'd be able to do it, they told me "You can't transfer your domain when there are less than 30 days to the renewal date" - essentially, they made me pay $35 for 4 more days. Luckily, easyDNS is nice enough to honor the remaining time on your domains.

I currently have one domain registered with Network Solutions, who are, of course eeeeeeevil, and when it comes up for expiration I'll go somewhere else.

I have another registered with Gandi. Although Gandi is cheap and doesn't send spam, that's about all I can say for them. I started trying yesterday to get a connection to their server so I could update a DNS entry to point to my new webhost. Tried around the clock at various times (including getting up at 1 a.m. my time), only got through after many many frustrating attempts. (Oh yeah, I e-mailed their support address, and got a reply saying that support was unavailable for an indefinite time.)

So who's good? I've heard good things about EasyDNS/opensrs/tucows, but they're not particularly cheap. Although I'm not a fan of Amazon's behavior (patents, labor relations,...), I'd be interested to see if they turn out to be a good registrar.

I'm curious how you handle DNS issues with a dynamic IP. My first instinct here would be a problem propogating changes when your ISP gives you a new IP. Is there a service for people who need domain name to dynamic IP resolution I haven't heard of? Links...

There are *many* services that do this. Let me list the two that I've used:

1. The first one is free and doesn't require you to buy your own domain. Simply create your own name in one of a bunch of available names, download one of the automatic update clients, and off you go.
2. The second one is free if you register your domain with them. You can either register a new domain with them, or transfer your domain to them. Doing so means paying at least some amount of money in order to create/transfer your registration with them for a minimum of (I think) one year. But the cost is no more than the standard registrars are getting... so it's sorta free. In any case, they also provide dynamic dns service.

Dude, I can't do a damn thing about what your ISP allows on the net. If someone doesn't like it, they won't accept traffic. What I'm saying is that an ISP should be able to let you run your server and block port 25 from everyone who isn't so we can all stop getting spam delivered from personal firewall software.

What I hear you saying is that you want an ISP that you don't have a relationship with to impose some rule on me, one of their paying customers, by filtering outbound port 25. I'm saying that you're external to the realtionship between me and my ISP. You don't, and shouldn't, have any say in that relationship. That should be between me, their paying customer, and them. And all of this talk about filtering port 25 comes down to someone else defining the rules between the ISP and their customers. Someone else imposing their will on something to which they have no relationship.

I hate spam as much as the next guy. Really I do. But I'm not willing to live in a filtered internet to get rid of it. That just seems too much like censorship to me. And as long as I'm the paying customer, and there's sufficient ISP competition, I'll be the one defining the terms of the relationship.

easyDNS

A little more expensive then other registrars but, then again, you've already found out you get what you pay for.

Registration and DNS management, regular and stealth web forwarding, URL forwarding, spam filtering (and a good anti-spam policy to kick off abusers), DNS redundancy, ACL access to your management pages ... and, most importantly, incredibly responsive customer support.

Search through Usenet for lots of recommendations.

easydns has done very well by me. Backup MX, domain transfers, dns primary and/or secondary, aliases, redirects, dynamic DNS, etc.

Good service, and cheap. Found a bug once. Got mail from the maintainer saying it was already fixed, and going out next week.

Still on hold with Network Solvent three years later on how the hell to transfer or delete a freakin HOST entry. Sigh.

In addition to the Versign scams, we have these idiots to deal with.

This of course has nothing to do with the ineptitude of these idiots.

The solution to dealing with these creeps naturally is to do business with a reputable, knowledgeable outfit, and the idiots seem to be kept at bay.

.mike

I've been trying to transfer one of my domains away... their WHOIS records say I've paid through 2004, yet they reject the transfer each time. The e-mail says it expired earlier in 2002. WTF? Their own WHOIS doesn't reflect their own records?

Thank goodness for easyDNS... I've moved all but that one domain over to them. Great service!!!

Bah ... you register your own domain name and set up you@yourdomain.com.

easyDNS has been doing this for me for years. Through 3 ISP changes. Flawlessly.

And way cheaper than $.05 an email.

Best registrar I've worked with is easyDNS - very good service, and their online domain management? OMG! My DNS changes are active within 15 minutes, it's sweet. :)

I suspect that your problems have more to do with RCOM than with Neulevel.

If you register the name through RCOM, then their job is to take your money ('natch), and send the info to Neulevel, who *only* needs to know who your nameservers are.

[Although, Neulevel's requirement that any nameservers for a .US domain be physically located in the U.S. of A. is up there on the dumb idea scale. The point of DNS is redundancy. Why put all your nameservers in the same basket?]

From then on, your zone file and MX settings, etc., are handled by your DNS provider (i.e. whoever runs your nameservers). If RCOM said your "zone file got corrupted", it sounds like they are covering up for some other incompetence.

Sure the .US registry is a "new thing". Managing DNS isn't, and that's what your problem likely is. Go check out easyDNS or another outsourced DNS company.

Transferring my domains to EasyDNS was an absolute joy. Highly recommended.

They are cheaper than netsol.com, more efficient, you get complete control over your dns settings (hmm would I like my server to refresh every 20 minutes or every 3 hours? hmm) and from what I gather are used by quite a few linux geeks.

eek I mean GNU/Linux GNU/Geeks.

(The preceding plug[tm] was brought to you by a non-bribed satisfied customer)

This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts

I host my own web stuff off my DSL line at home, but for mail, it made sense for me to outsource it to a professional outfit. These guys seem to be fairly clued about privacy and security.

It's not cheap ($15 a month) but it beats the alternative. An account with them, coupled with a good DNS provider should work wonders for you. Besides, all they do is email and if it doesn't work, it directly impacts their business. Unlike a lot of the bozos whose primary business is web hosting and email is an extra.

easydns have a nice admin interface, maybe their service has a few more features than you're asking for - but who knows when you might want to add another username@ pointing to somewhere else :) Reliable, and their servers are on multiple continents. (they don't webhost - they do dns, dynamic dns, mail forwarding and web redirection).

• Because NSI makes Microsoft look good in the monopolistic practices department
  
  
• Because it is far cheaper to use guys like EasyDNS than NSI
  
  
• Because when you switch, you usually extend your domain's life by a year at no extra cost (at least that's what you get at EasyDNS)
  
  
• Because trying to get *anything* done through NSI is an exercise in futility - amazingly, that includes trying to pay them!
  
  
• Because NSI thinks that "customer service" means "customers service NSI"
  

Get an easily configurable DNS service as in register.com or easydns.com. This way you can easily flip your domain name to a different ip address. If you register your domain at register.com or easydns.com, they will resolve your name to your IP address for free. Network Solutions will force you to use your DSL ISP for DNS. It could be hard to convince your ISP to resolve your DNS name if you're on a cheap service plan.

Also, easydns provides a backup MX, and they will even store your mail for something like 5 days if your primary MX is down. It's a very good idea if you're your own MX and your DSL connection tends to go down once in a while. Easydns also provides dynamic dns services, but I don't know if it works well if you're your own MX. Concentric web hosting cnchost.com and others usually provide good uptime and a few or unlimited number of POP boxes and even shell access. However, they rarely provide IMAP or SSH. Nick.

Yes, we are only doing this for about 20 domains, and I imagine it would get very unwieldy and problematic in a variety of ways for 1000. But that's not the business we're in.

Well, I can't speak about IRC, as I've never implemented it. But we've got a very small virtual host setup for our clients (about 20) on one server - all name based. We use easyDNS right now, but we certaily could move to doing DNS ourselves. FTP, Telnet, etc., work just fine.

I strongly recommend using a separate company to host your DNS. Sure, the company that hosts your website will through in DNS hosting for free, but if they are negligent or incompetent or unfortunate, your the one who will suffer. My web-server is hosted by one ISP but I use Easy DNS to manage my domain. There are many similar services out there too.

The bottom line is that you should have your website hosted by professionals who specialize in managing webservers, but your DNS should be hosted by professionals who specialize in managine DNS servers. The two are very different, and far too many admins take DNS management lightly.