posted by steve | Category: Random Rants |

I recently (well, ok, several months ago) moved the authoritative DNS for this domain, braingia.org, over to a new hosting provider.  Actually, this was quite a shift for me.  For the previous 9 years I’ve managed the authoritative name servers for the domain myself using BIND, with everything running happily and smoothly.

However, I’m no longer managing as many servers and therefore I had no (easy) way to provide redundant DNS for the domain.  With that in mind, I made a decision to change the authoritative DNS over to a standard hosting provider.  Things were going good.  Using their interface I was able to add and change A records and TTLs as necessary, create subdomains, and have the MX pointing to my own server, etc:  All the stuff a guy needs to do with his domain.

Low and behold, there was a problem with a mailing list on a subdomain of braingia.org.  Weird problem; still not solved.  Anyway, not being able to check the mail logs to try to glean more details I opened a ticket with the provider.  It went downhill from there.  Suddenly I began to get notices and host not found errors for previously working hosts within the domain.

Turns out that one of the engineers at the provider decided that “there were problems with the zone” and without asking chose to revert the domain to the default template, thus removing all of the custom hosts, subdomains, TTLs, MX, everything that had been built up over the last 9 years of owning the domain.

Luckily I had a backup of the zone handy and was able to get it restored by the provider.  However, I can’t imagine what would’ve happened if I didn’t have a clean copy of the zone ready to be loaded.  Well, I can imagine:  I would’ve had to rebuild all of the records by hand.

The moral of the story, aside from venting, is that I’ll be switching DNS back over to my own server and then trying to find a host to do reliable secondary DNS.  And by reliable I mean “won’t touch the zone without my involvement.”  You know, the little things.