Wednesday, July 25, 2007

GoDaddy Sucks

As I write this GoDaddy has managed to completely screw up authoritative DNS for krisk.org. They have been my registrar for quite some time. Yesterday I decided to switch my authoritative dns over to them from DynDns. Why would I do this?

I needed e-mail forwarding. KrisK.org used to be hosted on a FreeBSD server that I ran. I started to get more and more busy with AstLinux and other misc. stuff so I moved as many of my services to free or managed solutions.

I couldn't do e-mail forwarding because GoDaddy's recommended MX records were CNAMEs. DynDns does not approve of this (every MX should be an A record). So I needed to move everything to GoDaddy just so I could use their stupid free e-mail forwarding (krisk.org -> gmail).

I tried to get to this blog today and blog.krisk.org wasn't resolving. What gives? I tried digging a few DNS servers that I knew of. All of them returned NXDOMAIN. That's not good. I ran whois and krisk.org to find the authoritative name servers. I was (and still am) on ns5.secureserver.net and ns6.secureserver.net. I tried to do directly against them:

kris@krislap:~$ dig @ns5.secureserver.net

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> @ns5.secureserver.net
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 11126
;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;. IN NS

;; Query time: 70 msec
;; SERVER: 208.109.78.180#53(208.109.78.180)
;; WHEN: Wed Jul 25 15:22:43 2007
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 17

Same deal with ns6. That's not good. Some of my other domains on GoDaddy have ns1 and ns2. I tried to dig against those and they worked. The funny thing was ns5 and ns6 were not found as NS records.

I shuddered at the thought of calling GoDaddy support. I certainly don't want to talk to any of "those people". By "those people" I mean script reading drones that would ask me which version of Internet Explorer I was using...

I logged into the extremely horrible GoDaddy portal and clicked "Use default hosting name servers". They were listed as ns5 and ns6. I wasn't hopeful. A few minutes later it appears to be working again:

kris@krislap:~$ dig @ns5.secureserver.net www.krisk.org

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> @ns5.secureserver.net www.krisk.org
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 11574
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.krisk.org. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.krisk.org. 3600 IN CNAME godaddy.krisk.org.
godaddy.krisk.org. 3600 IN A 68.178.211.88

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
krisk.org. 3600 IN NS NS1.SECURESERVER.NET.
krisk.org. 3600 IN NS NS2.SECURESERVER.NET.
krisk.org. 3600 IN NS ns5.SECURESERVER.NET.
krisk.org. 3600 IN NS ns6.SECURESERVER.NET.

;; Query time: 76 msec
;; SERVER: 208.109.78.180#53(208.109.78.180)
;; WHEN: Wed Jul 25 15:32:13 2007
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 157


Woah! Look at that! ns1, ns2, ns5, and ns6 are listed as authority. Hmmm...

P.S. - If you are still reading this I need to tell you that DynDns is AWESOME!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Also

http://www.everydns.net/

Anonymous said...

Yes, GoDaddy does indeed suck. They are so big that losing a customer doesn't matter - another will fill the spot right away. If you want slow servers that time out, techs who don't know what you are talking about and form emails and surveys sent constantly by all means use them. If you have a family website to show pictures of your last vacation use them, they are cheap. If you rely on having content available for site visitors forget GoDaddy. I have 20 years experience with shared hosting and GoDaddy takes the "WORST" award. I have decided to leave them. In the end you get what you pay for. Try smaller companies who must try harder to survive.