The Internet is closed. Go Away.

[serinde]

When you wake up for the weekend to find that LJ is DOA and your employer-cum-ISP's domain name has been hijacked, it is either time to go back to bed & pull the covers up, or play a fuckload of City of Heroes. No need to guess the path I chose, True Believers!

(Don't look at me like that! This required a) social engineering and b) deep wizardry; we the humble phone firewall could do nothing but field customer email, which I did my part of--Alt-Tab is your friend. This is also why me and my minions were free to attend mir_nyc's lovely birthday bash last night.)

We're back now, after the people at Melbourne IT made their languid way into the office and fixed things (after that first cup of coffee and reading the paper, natch). It may take awhile for the DNS to propagate, though, so if you have Panix correspondents, send to them at panix dot net for the next day or so.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Social engineering? Christ. I'd love to find out which idiot let your domain name be taken. I sure hope Melbourne IT is going to make it up to you.

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

There seems to have been A Breakdown Of Procedures at several levels.

1) We believed we'd had register-lock turned on for all domains. When things went pear-shaped, we noticed this was no longer the case for .net and .org, at least. So, WTF.

2) According to Dotster (our registrar), they had never received a transfer request, and by all their lights & records everything was just fine. So the notification that Verisign was required to send to Dotster that this domain was being transferred never happened.

3) Melbourne IT, as we now know to our vexation, doesn't work weekends--but the fake zone was loaded there Saturday morning, our time. So it kinda looks like someone either there or at their reseller that actually did the deed is in on it; or one of the two above is compromised.

As I understand it, the only reason we were back as "quickly" (ha) as we were is thanks to the NANOG cabal, several of whom were in a position to exert pressure on the appropriate slow-moving corporate entities. God save us if we'd had to go through ICANN's precious dispute procedures.

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

Blurg. I meant "Saturday morning THEIR time", of course.

[arkham1010.livejournal.com]

I saw the slashdot article about it, looks like MIT is a bunch of wankers, and you guys had a hell of a weekend. :/

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

FSVO "fixed", as things still aren't back the way they were before — MelbIT is still listed as the registrar for panix.com, which they're not, while Dotster's records still have them in control of it, as if nothing happened — and that state shouldn't have been able to be reached, according to people who'd know.

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

The root servers are with us and that's my horizon at the moment.

[rainbear.livejournal.com]

I had been following the discussion on the NANOG list..

http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/ (relevant things usually had "Panix" in the subject line)

It made for an interesting weekend of reading.. I am, however, glad that things are being resolved! :) This is a Good Thing(tm)!

[metalfatigue]

Well, you can tell your boss(es) that the publicity about this event caused me to take note of how much cheaper a shell account would be with Panix than with my current provider, and I'm likely to switch within the next month. So it's not all bad.