In the last few days I’ve been working with an individual at my old high school on some problems related to the DNS of the schools domain name. Today one of the emails included the following line:

"I know this goes beyond the scope of your contract with us, so I just wanted to let you know that I do appreciate the help!!!"

Its funny in so many ways. There is no contract first of all. I do what I do because I for some reason still care about the school. Second, my only relationship now with the school is that I am the reseller handling the registration for the domain through Enom.

This person has no idea what she is doing when it comes to the domain name, or the web presence of the school in general.

In June she received a email telling her that her hosting provider needed her to change DNS servers for the domain because they were changing "platforms" and their robot picked up that the domain didn’t transition. After receiving the email she contacted hosting support, and they told her the domain was registered with Enom. Enom promptly informed her that she had to deal with PCFIRE Domain Services (thats me ) to get the change made, since she didn’t have web access to the domain. Funny thing here is that she DID and unfortunately still DOES have access to the domain from the web console. She tried emailing me at an address that dropped her directly to SPAM and she called me in a panic trying to get things working. I checked my voicemail 2 days later. I was given very little information about the change that was needed, so I decided to blindly make the change for her and let the burden of DNS rest completely on her. I warned her several times that there may be unpredictable side effects from doing the change.

I received no reply from her. A few days ago, another panicked email. One of the instructors couldn’t get to their web page because it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. She emailed me to see if maybe it had something to do with the change she ordered. Hmm…. you think it just might? I checked out the website and discovered that it didn’t seem to matter about the external hosting, so I mimicked her existing redirect configuration (domain is on external hosting, just to be redirected) and replied asking if everything was ok. She was extremely happy. Funny thing is… all I did was move the servers back to where they were before June’s little game.

I suspect I will have to deal with her again in a few days when she finds out that e-mail is not functional for the domain. Apparently Enom stores the domain’s host informations, but not its MX (email) records. I do not remember the server addresses and the email provider doesn’t list them publicly, so I seriously hope when she emails me about that, she is able to provide me with the MX records for the domain. Email was something else she was warned about in June, but I suppose she was just worried about the web presence and not student email, which wouldn’t be relevant until August 25th, in 5 days.