kate's infrastructure

A relative had a child recently, and I thought it was a very ‘now’ thing to do to register them a domain name.  It might not be for much more than baby photos now but it might be a useful myspace redirection when they’re an angsty teen.  Completely infatuated with my new web host I thought I’d kick the domain registration their way.  A few clicks and I’d confirmed the availability of the new domain and registered it.  Awesomely easy and I felt like a technical genius. 

As my webhost of choice acts as both a host and a domain registrar, I had to run through the final step of setting it up to be actually hosted (2 month old children aren’t awesome at doing such things themselves).  It failed immediately, which led me to believe I’d done something wrong.

I checked their support wiki, I’d appear to have followed the steps.  Really there’s no rocket science involved, so I don’t see how I could have screwed it up.  That being said, it hadn’t actually worked, so evidence suggested that I had in fact screwed something up.

Next was time to eliminate some of the obvious stuff.  Unfortunately I had a pretty short list:

1. Try again.  Nope, still doesn’t work.
2. Try again using a different option (e.g. Park the domain).  Nope, still doesn’t work.
3. Check that the domain name has propogated.  Yes, whois records show my registration and I can reach it from other sites on the interweb.  All a-ok.
4. Um, Try Again.  Still doesn’t work.
5. Raise a support request.  Try to not sound like a lunatic.

(Yes, I should be in testing)

A quick back-and-forth with the support team and I learn that I can’t add my newly registered domain to my host because it’s already registered under an expired account there.  No, that wasn’t in my list above of random tasks to try.  Seriously though, even if it was in someone’s account they didn’t hold the registration for the domain itself.  Obviously it wouldn’t have let me register a domain that belonged to someone else, and I did a WHOIS from a different registrar to start with, so as far as the internet was concerned, this was up for grabs.

I tried to plead my case, as this sounds a little crazy, and my request has been moved to a different support queue.  It got me thinking though, aside from my receipt for payment, I have nothing to refute the history of the domain.  I didn’t even think to check this.  What if it was chock full of unsavoury content in a previous incarnation?  How can I find out what has gone before? 

1. Google Cache: I decided that this would show me nothing so I didn’t check it first.  I generally use the cache to check out sites that are offline when I need them. 

2. WayBack Machine: The Internet Archive is the most awesome at this sort of venture.  Ultimately you either love or hate that it exists.   There’s always stuff you wish wasn’t archived, but it usually pretty useful.  No matches for my site.

3. Search for WHOIS history tools:  I guess this is all I really wanted, I just wanted to confirm that it had been registered before.  I stumbled upon domaintools.com and it looked perfect.  Unfortunately the front page did little service to a skim reader such as myself and I came away with the conclusion that additional funds were required.  A little frantic searching later and I found their ultra awesome subdomain: http://whois.domaintools.com/.  Running a WHOIS from there not only returns the WHOIS record, but gives me some added extras including the host, web server software and history.  Perfect.

4. Google Cache: I did eventually check google for completeness.  It did return me results indicating my domain of choice had come up on lists as about to expire back in March.  That was enough info for me to use in the first place to confirm that it had been registered previously and that the registration had long since expired. 

Conclusion: The unexpected will always arise, the simplest solution is best and bookmark whois.domaintools.com.

Check out the NetCraft web server survey and news site: http://news.netcraft.com/

It’s pretty straight forward and contains some interesting data about web server trends and usage.  It’s particularly interesting to see major organisation downtime (Blogger, Cisco) as well as some of the shift away from Apache.  Microsoft’s IIS and the not so Microsoft lighttpd are emerging as interesting players.  I think I might need to take another look at these.