Web Site Outage

On July 6^th, campus.net, a web hosting organization made some changes to their Web hosting records. The process included decommissioning some old domain names and consolidating their other DNS domains over to Network Solutions. Somehow our domain name got caught in the shuffle and our domain name was redirected to the Network Solutions DNS servers. The Network Solutions DNS servers had no idea awsaeast.org existed and therefore nobody could get to the site.

On July 7th I was notified of the web site being down I called around and talked to all parties involved with setting up awsaeast and nobody knew the person responsible for making the change, a Mr. William Muller, so I suspected a high jacking. I called Network Solutions and asked them to look into all the past records from when the domain first got established. This implemented a legal process and they put a lock on changes to the domain name until their legal team reviewed it.

On July 9^th I was able to contact the owners of campus.net directly and explain the situation. They were perplexed as to what happened and were very helpful in trying to resolve the situation. However, since the domain name was under legal review both campus.net and myself had to submit paper work authorizing the release of the lock. It turned out that awsaeast did engage Mr. Muller back in 1996 and he originally established the domain name.

On July 12^th we made our first attempt to submit the proper paper work. Network Solutions wasn’t satisfied and required a notarized paper with photo id, which was submitted shortly after.

On July 14^th Network Solutions released the lock. I sent William Muller all the information necessary to point back to Frank’s DNS servers and the when the changes propagate through the DNS world the site became available. He will remain the administrator for the next couple of days to make sure everything is working satisfactory, and then update the records with my name. I will then have access to Network Solutions for any necessary changes.

This whole time the server was up and accessible by any member of the Bealenet ISP and by the server IP address. Scott Atkinson of USAWATERSKI worked with us by hard coding the ip address on his site so users could get to the download pages. Many thanks to all who helped get the site back online.

Mike