Well, when people flee in droves, Chuck can go back to selling cars/encyclopoedias, whatever. For every high level admin they piss off, they must realize they're losing all of the business those folks indirectly control. In light of their virtual monopoly, you'd think the gummint would be a bit more interested in their shoddy service. C ----- Original Message ----- From: Marc Slemko <marcs@znep.com> To: <nanog@merit.edu> Sent: Saturday, March 20, 1999 8:56 PM Subject: heads up: internic changes

Just FYI, if your company relies on any service that the internic provides WRT domain registrations to help your own customers in registering domain names, you should check to make sure everything still works. You also probably want to be sure you don't let your customers anywhere near the InterNIC's web site, since they have gone even further in their attempts to confuse and trick people into paying for extra NSI services.

http://www.internic.net/ now redirects you to http://www.networksolutions.com/ with many or most of the old URLs invalid. Things like web based whois, access to forms, etc. are now entirely different and it doesn't appear any attempt has been made at not breaking sites that link to them. In fact, the opposite seems true.

Also, their finger-based frontend to their tracking system is coincidentally broken.

Also, they conveniently don't have a ftp server accessible at ftp://ftp.internic.net/ but only on rs.internic.net. In addition, the templates that used to be easily accessible from their website aren't any more, and you are now almost forced to go through their web based registration system which tries to lead you astray to their extra "value added services" at every step, unless you know you can get the templates via ftp at rs.internic.net.

Also, they have deliberately obscured the line between their extra money-grubbing services and a basic domain registration even more.

Also, their telnet based whois is no longer available, and with it goes the last hope for getting info of if a domain is on hold or not or of accessing whois during their frequent outages.

Unfortunately, none of this has helped their online payment system which is still horribly slow or down most of the time.

It is quite obvious they are running scared for their future. Unfortunately, they still don't realize that providing good customer service is their best way to ensure a future.

On Sat, 20 Mar 1999, Marc Slemko wrote:

http://www.networksolutions.com/ with many or most of the old URLs

Does anyone remember the days when (1994 or so) you tried to register more than one domain for your company/corporation was met with a reply stating that this wasn't really allowed? Now, on http://www.networksolutions.com homepage: "Protect your Internet Brand", Consider securing your dot net and dot org Web addresses as well. This is blasphemy. It appears the real reason they didn't want you registering them in the past is that you didn't pay for them; I guess now that you pay for them, they can recommend that you register as many as possible, since it is direct revenues. It's sickening. -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Atheism is a non-prophet organization. I route, therefore I am. Alex Rubenstein, alex@nac.net, KC2BUO, ISP/C Charter Member Father of the Network and Head Bottle-Washer Net Access Corporation, 9 Mt. Pleasant Tpk., Denville, NJ 07834 Don't choose a spineless ISP; we have more backbone! http://www.nac.net -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --