I’ve spoken with a variety of support folks from Register.com over the past 26 hours. All have been helpful, and courteous. None, however, has been able to resolve my domain woes one way or the other. I want to document my situation in writing, so that we can start to make some forward progress.
This message starts with a narrative of the current situation, documents my errors, and suggests three possible solutions. I would appreciate a response as to which of the solutions is appropriate.
History:
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* I registered the domain “xxxx.org” with Register.com several years ago. I have a separate company providing a co-located server, which is still online at its proper IP address (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx). The whole point of the current exercise is to restore proper function of the forward lookup for “dwan.org”.
* I allowed the domain “xxxx.org” to expire at Register.com on August 2 of this year. Shortly thereafter, the DNS authority was changed to the server “expireddomains.register.com”.
* When I saw “this domain is expired” on the morning of the 7th, I immediately initiated a transfer of registration from Register.com to GoDaddy. As I’ve mentioned on the phone, the only reason for this change is the cost difference between the two companies. After a day offline, and looking at an indefinite further time offline, the $10 seems trivial. If I could pay $100 to solve this problem immediately, I would happily do so. I’m very serious about that: If there is any “professional” or “platinum” level of service that would allow us to actually effect these changes *now*, I would happily pay for it.
* I had foolishly set the contact email address for “xxxx.org” to an email address within that same domain. This meant that I could not receive the confirmation messages generated by my transfer request.
* I called register.com to verify my approval of the transfer. At this point I learned that a domain must be in “active” state in order to transfer. I immediately paid the $35 to re-activate the domain. I then verbally approved the domain transfer.
* The representative and I then began to try to set the dns authority back to the correct values. (ns1.hostdns4u.com and ns2.hostdns4u.com). The support email I received explained the core problem that I’m facing now:
“The reason we cannot change your dns nameservers is because your domain name is pending transfer to the new registrar. You will have to wait for the domain name to transfer in order to change the nameservers.”
* Given that, I began trying to expedite the domain transfer. I spoke on the phone with representatives from both register.com and GoDaddy. Both companies agree that all necessary authorizations, approvals, and so on are in place. Both are also in agreement that after this becomes true (all preconditions satisfied) there is a 5 to 7 day lag before the transfer can be effected. This would be fine if I were online now (i.e: If we had corrected the dns authority prior to initiating the transfer). However in the current state it’s not acceptable.
* After an afternoon trying to expedite the transfer, I decided to give up. I contacted Register.com (around 8pm on the 7th) and confirmed that if we “rejected” the transfer, the domain would revert to a normal state “within an hour,” and we would then be able to correct the DNS authority. After that was done, and the dust had settled, I could make a decision about retrying the registry transfer.
* I tried at midnight, and again this morning to correct the DNS authority for “xxxx.org”. The register.com interface still rejects my changes. The whois server still lists the domain as “pending transfer”.
I made a series of mistakes:
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* The contact email was set to an email address within the domain.
* I allowed the domain to lapse before initiating the transfer. Register.com is very clear about the procedure when the domain is expired. This is why I immediately resubscribed with r.c.
* I initiated the transfer prior to correcting the dns authority. Again, in hindsight, everyone is immensely clear in your service agreements that this process takes 5 to 7 days to complete. I can’t seem to establish why there is this lag, but it is very well documented.
How I would like to proceed
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This is a domain that I administer for my family. I have to explain to my mother why she can’t get her email. I therefore have a strong incentive to correct the problems (caused by my own mistakes, as documented above) as soon as possible.
At this point, I don’t care who the registrar of record is for the domain. I’ve paid for three additional years of registration, spread across two companies. I would happily pay again if we could resolve this in the next hour.
What would be unacceptable would be to settle down, wait out the weeks lag, only to discover that some further action was required to finalize something or other.
# Possible solution 1:
The simplest solution that I can imagine would be for register.com to add a forward entry for “xxxx.org” in the “expireddomains.register.com” nameservers. If those nameservers pointed to my (still functioning) server, I would be back online now. This would also short-circut our ongoing conversations about DNS and whois propagation times.
# Possible solution 2
The next simplest solution would be for me to convince GoDaddy to “take” the domain. This would violate the “5 to 7 day” penalty, but I’m convinced that if I talked to the right person, it could happen with startling speed.
# Possible solution 3
The least likely solution, from my perspective, would be for register.com to successfully remove the domain from “Pending transfer” state so that I could change the DNS authority. After chatting with four different support people, I believe that you’re all very competent, but that this action is beyond your power.
# Possible solution 4
I wait 7 days, and hope that there are no further complications.
I would be happy with any of the first three, and I’m willing to accept number 4 if we are absolutely sure that it will work.
Please let me know how we should proceed.
-Chris Dwan
–Contact info expunged–
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