ICANN (The big cheese of domain names if you will) approved customized top level domain names!

Via The Register

“ICANN, the organization that oversees internet addresses, will soon allow anyone to apply for his very own generic top-level domain (gTLD). In other words, you’ll soon have the power to put almost anything at the end of your url, eschewing existing top-level domains such as “.com” or “.edu.”

“This is a historic resolution,” said ICANN chairman Peter Dungate Thrush, during a conference call with reporters, just after the organization’s annual meeting in Paris. “You should see this as being as significant as Margaret Thatcher’s decision to liberalize the telecoms market in the UK. This is a decision to fully liberalize the TLD space.”

ICANN estimates it will begin taking applications in April or May of next year. The fee for each application will be “in the low six figures in American dollars,” and the first customized gTLDs will likely arrive in the fourth quarter of 2009.”

Anyone want to buy .sc before Daniel (ServerComplete Owner) snags it?

[Source - The Register]

Well I have been inactive for a while I know. But that is because there has not been any real good news. But I am heare to report this to the happy blog readers out there.

Ian Lamont writes

“Anti-spam service Knujon has released reports highlighting how certain registrars in the US and abroad have consistently failed to live up to certain WHOIS-related obligations under ICANN’s Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) — specifically, the requirement that people or company registering domains provide valid contact information. Now the firm is requesting that ICANN shut down the worst alleged offender, Xinnet Bei Gong Da Software. According to Knujon, none of the WHOIS records in a sample of 11,000 alleged spam sites registered through Xinnet and reported by Knujon to ICANN’s Whois Data Problem Report System were corrected in a six-month period ending in May 2008 — and the Chinese registrar continues to register about 100 spam sites per day. In many cases, says the Knujon document (PDF), Xinnet does not have ‘any Whois record data for review while the sites are still active’ and the spam sites further promote ’seal abuse’ by posting bogus BBB, Verisign, and other trusted industry seals. ICANN says it is investigating. ICANN has just posted a draft revised RAA that is open for public comment until August 4. However, the wording of Section 3.7.8, governing registrars’ obligations to check and correct domain owners’ contact information, hasn’t changed.”

Well BurstNET has struck again! I submitted a simple upgrade request for RAM for one of our customers still in the BurstNET facility and here we are, almost 7 days later, without the additional RAM.

After pestering the live AIM support agent for BurstNET I found out that the sales, billing, and order processing departments decided to take a nice long weekend, well more like the entire week off.

According to the AIM rep, no new orders have been processed nor have any sales or billing tickets. This really irritated me, but there is not much I can do except call or email them The prices at BurstNET are unbelievable, but it goes without saying, you get what you pay for!

Now, for those of you reading, no worries! We no longer are working with new servers from BurstNET and are phasing all existing servers out as people upgrade. All new signups and major upgrades are getting shiny new hardware out of Dallas

-Daniel | Server Complete

Well on Wednesday night (28 May) two hackers calling themselves KRYOGENIKS Defiant and EBK. Gained access to over 200 of Comcast’s domains. Once they had access to this they directed Comcast.net to other servers and this caused Comcast users to not have access to there email accounts for several hours. How they managed to pull this off is not fully known but it seems to be a flaw with Network Solutions (Comcast’s Registar)

The registar reported

“Normally defacement attacks simply involve the spraying of digital graffiti on a website. However, in the case of the Comcast attack it seems some attempt may have been made to snoop on its users’ login credentials.”

But in an interview on another site (I can not seem to find the link) the hackers said that altho they could have attempted to get passwords but did not.

Source 1: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/29/comcast_hack

Seems everything has been fixed now and all is back online.

-Tracker

As most of you know, The Planet had a massive outage that affected 9,000 servers in the old eV1Servers / RackShack location. This is the second time that this situation has occurred at DC1 of The Planet.

Currently The Planet wholly owns 5 or 6 facilities in the Houston area and only DC1 was affected by this outage.

The explosion / fire erupted on Saturday evening and knocked out three internal walls around the electrical equipment room. The datacenter was evacuated and emergency personnel called to the scene. Once the building and all equipment was inspected by The Planet as well as the respective manufacturers, they were able to begin work on restoring power to Phase 2 of the facility where they have successfully brought many clients back online.

As of right now, I believe they have restored power to the lower level as well and have began the task of rebooting all of the servers.

Each and every piece of equipment had been abruptly powered off by the malfunction and caused many servers to require FSCK’s to be run. Each and every machine was checked over once powered back on to ensure everything is in working order.

Currently the network is still quite shaky as it levels back out and bugs in the networking gear are settled. Not to mention the large number of people that are going to be taking and downloading complete server backups and checking over everything to make sure all is well.

This event will most likely cause severe network degradation over the next week or two as everything is leveled out and recovers from the nearly 72 hours of no power.

Best of luck to all of you who have servers at The Planet’s DC1 I personally do not have any servers there, but I have done quite a lot of research into the situation.

Luckily no servers were damaged in this incident, they only suffered massive downtime.

-Daniel | Server Complete Founder