I’m having a difficult time in accepting it as such, really. Though, I am finding a little bit of humor involved in all of this. See, I’m not sure for those of you out there who’re unfamiliar with managing or owning your own domain name, but I’ve been owning domain names since 1996. This means, of course, that I’ve had to deal with InterNIC, which then turned into Network Solutions back in 98, which is now Verisign. Luckily, InterNIC’s processes were pretty much unchanged when Network Solutions bought them. They still used the ol’ email authorization forms and things were simple. You filled out the little web form on their home page, you gave them your handle and contact information for confirmation and a few minutes later, you had the right forms sitting in your email box waiting for reply back to the hostmaster.
Not so anymore, or so I was led to beleive. See, recently, we’d undergone a huge network migration that resulted in all of our IPs being changed without warning. This is the equivalent of someone coming into your house and moving everything you own to another house in another city, complete with a new mailing address and telephone number. No warning, no preplanning, no preparation… just that you suddenly live somewhere else and no one knows where the fuck that is anymore. In the Internet world, domain names are translated into addresses of numbers. So, in this case, we got moved and so I’ve been having to deal with Verisign over how to update those records.
First, I called them up, spoke to some service rep for a while, and got some of the basic information. Unbeknowest to me, I had been migrated from use of the old email system to their new handy-dandy web client. This web client would allow me to make changes on the fly, without having to wait for emails or registration numbers anymore. I thought, wow, this is great, actually. Now instead of waiting 72-96 hours, my changes’ll be instant. The net propagation would be reduced, since it’s automatic. However, the promised land was not to be so easily reached. There were a couple of problems standing in my way. The first of which was the fact that since I never ever set this account up, I was forced by Verisign to prove who I was. Okay, no problem, or so I thought. Under the old NetSol regime, this required money and a faxed authorization. The money was to speed up the changes I needed done, and the fax authorization was for their records, in case I wasn’t who I said I was and the real me decided to sue them for accepting a bogus request. Whatever… so this time, all they wanted was a faxed authorization. But, this authorization had to be in a certain format, on company letterhead. Basically stating that I was requesting full access to the domain name for myself, and that I was vouching for me as an authorized representative of Otaking.org. Okay, that’s sort of a circular argument, but you get the general idea about how these types of beuacracies work. I wrote up a little letter, in what I thought was the proper format, and faxed it in the week we came back online. I called up this evening to ask what the status was on the account, since they never called me back about it and as it turns out… the fax was rejected because I didn’t put a proper cover sheet on it.
This is where I started to think I was in that movie Office Space. I almost started laughing, trying not to mention the words “TPS Report.” Needless to say, we went back and forth, many more faxes were submitted and returned, cover sheets done and redone until their side would accept it as a foolproof authorization for access to the stupid web client. The whole dialogue and process took most of the night. Five hours after the initial phone call, I finally got access to the web site account and lo and behold there it was. But when I went under that section, it turns out that they only want you to enter in already established name servers. Well, fuck me. The whole reason behind this gauntlet was the change the IP address of the name server in question. So I call them back, talking to the tenth person from their company and asking for them to walk me through. Guess what? It’s STILL A FUCKING EMAIL FORM. Turns out I never had to fax shit to them, because they still use the mail-from for the host modification stuff. I damn near had a hysterical fit.
Anyway, I’m laughing about it now, since it looks like they accepted the changes, but man oh man. Talk about ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag. Good news is, I won’t have to go through this bullshit later.
