Isn't it amazing how much extra work gets generated because of billing for domain names? Call centers, directors of communications... are we this desperate to create jobs? How many hours of productivity where wasted world wide being on the hold with InterNIC? Looking up receipts? This entire thing could and should be automated. Dirk On Wed, 26 Mar 1997, George Herbert wrote:
I just finished up a phone conversation (45 min or so) with Chuck Gomes at InterNIC (NSI), regarding the recent set of problems that have happened with various domains. While it appears that a number of issues remain to be investegated, I think that Chuck addressed most of the major concerns I had and said he's investegating the other concerns. He said they are working on a FAQ / info release on recent events and hope to send it out tomorrow, though he couldn't guarantee it would be that soon.
The most important thing that came up in the conversation was that the event that appears to have percipitated the rash of public complaints is that they are in the process of catching up their billing status so that domains that haven't paid are now in the 30-15-5-hold-deleted track not sitting in limbo for months before being acted on. This means that they are now seeing many many months worth of minor accumulated errors hitting all at once, effectively.
Chuck said that they are implimenting a new problem handling procedure, if your domain is about to go on hold email to billing@internic with the keywords URGENT and DEACTIVATION in the subject will get seen most promptly and he stated that their policy is that they are supposed to always err on the side of leaving domains turned on while issues are investegated. He did comment that they have had problems with that not always being the case, but he's working on making sure that policy is consistent in all cases.
We also talked about various specific problems they've been seeing and he disclosed some failures they had recently in check and credit card billing accounting and in domain status processing. He said that they'd fixed most of them shortly after they occurred, but a few were lingering on and are expected to be fixed this week. The problem of having credit card payments not going to the right domain (and he brought up a related problem, refunds in multi-payment cases) he said was known and being looked at. I don't think they know what they are going to do about it yet but they are aware of it.
I did comment that they need more proactive communications about things like this, and he said they have a fulltime communications director who's been hired and is coming up to speed.
On the whole, I am a lot less unhappy about recent events than I was yesterday, I think he addressed the concerns I had about what's going on. There are problems, some of which they know remain large and unresolved, but I don't think now that we saw a sudden bitrot in their databases last week. I'm looking forwards to the official announcement...
-george william herbert gherbert@crl.com
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