Network Solutions Misery

[Henri J. Schlereth]

Greetings,

Cedric wrote:
> I went and read the rules, application forms, and related 
> guidelines that consitute the process of setting up a registrar.
> It's medium-complicated, requires a bit of back-end work
> in order to program a system for doing registrations, and
> requires various capital sums - USD$20,000 s/w licence fee,
> a large performance bond (~USD$150,000, or something like
> that), and so on.  It's a bit heavy on the legalese. (!)

I dont doubt that this is yet another method to discourage
competition. I made that suggestion based on the apparent
level of annoyance with NSI. I was unaware of the cost/legalese
factors but those costs could be spread out thru all the
edu's if they really wanted to control their own registrar.

> 
> Before you tie up that much capital, one needs a better
> reason than "it took a little hassle to do a domain name change",

The hassle level at NSI varies. I worked at an ISP for two years,
and had variable results for customers but havent had any problems
myself. As you stated, I too know the hoops with NSI.
However, from a service level viewpoint this should not be so
awkward. But then again people accept Microsoft products failings as
well. "What's a little crash every day compared to learning/doing
something new" It all depends on the annoyance factor.

Personally I use NSI because I know how to make it work, personally
I have used some Microsoft products because I know how to make them
work. But I also run Linux on 4 out 6 machines because some reliability
features were unacceptable. We are talking at a server level of course.

Politically , I never agreed with NSI having a monopoly on domains anymore
than I accept Microsoft having a monopoly. Even the new registrars are
still dependent on NSI ultimately because they control the database.

I would prefer a more International handling of this process, (gasp),
but then again I am an American that grew up in Germany, so I dont
quit have the US-centric viewpoint.

I joined and was accepted into the At-large membership for ICANN (1 of
35,000) but their slow processing of the membership means that whatever
they will do in the Rio summit this year will probably be a shotgun
wedding that none of us can influence or alter.

> As for the NSI, I used have problems with them a few years
> back, but haven't had any issues recently (~1yr).  As a
> hosting and consulting service, we deal with a measurable
> number of domain registration issues every month.  As for
> _moving_ of names, I've never bothered to try it - it always
> seemed a heck of a lot more straight forward to simply
> register the new name, migrate off the old ones, then
> delete the old ones. 

Couldnt agree with you more on the above. The easiest parts were
in order a.) set up new b.) delete old c.) modify contact info
and worst was transfer. Of course propagation has always been hit
and miss with NSI.


> I've gotten very random service from some of the other
> registrars, and I know exactly how to make the NSI 
> hop to it when need be.  As I a result, I'm still
> using the NSI, though I have started to look at the
> TuCows services as an alternative as NSI does not
> seem interested in talking to me about setting up
> a charge account (been trying that for months!:),

Yeah, that was always a mud slogging process. I got it
to work exactly once and it took involving several owners
and a lot of time,emails and phone calls, NSI seems to like
cash,check or money order above all.


Regards,
Henri

-- 
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"Perfectly normal, perfectly healthy." Adam Carrola
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