Monday, November 18, 2013

Network Solutions = AOL Email. If you want to be respected in the 21st century switch to another provider.


Worked on a server environment migration to a datacenter yesterday. Everything went smoothly except for DNS was not working for the client. I spent an extra 2 hours troubleshooting DNS. I repeatedly attempted to update DNS in the Network Solutions webpage, and it would not show the updated entries. Tried with IE, Chrome, and multiple OSes. Nada. Turns out it was a bug in the NetSol system. A call to support indicated that. So, I was assured it would be resolved on Sunday, almost 24 hrs later on Monday, still not working. DNS A records are showing up web page with one entry, and the result is not showing up on the NetSol NS query responses. So, if you updated with 1.1.1.1 and do a DNS query the original IP pre-Sunday.

Just to be CLEAR.... if I query ns57.worldnic.com & ns58.worldnic.com which are the client's NS entries PER Network Solutions, they respond with the wrong entries. How nice. Call to support, and the script reading call rep, didn't understand the issue and kept repeating it takes 24 hours to propagate. Another favorite is you delete or change an entry on the NetSol "advanced DNS" page and the changes aren't displayed. Logout and log back in, same info. This happens on the main webpage and DNS as well. What a joke of a system. I tried to switch to a 3rd party DNS system, and the NetSol NS are not following the DNS spec for NS lookups at point of entry (I added my NS entries ns10.operationdns.com, etc). NetSol claimed they cant' be found, but even the native Windows DNS finds them. Sigh.... So sad the founding internet's domain name provider has failed so badly similar to AOL.

DNS Tool I like since it allows me to query against any NS and for any record
http://centralops.net/co/


-Ben