More registrar hunting

Still looking for the perfect registrar.

After asking around on the AAISP IRC channel #A&A, someone mentioned an outfit called Portfast.

Portfast appears to be a provider of hosting, virtual servers, and domain names. They offer native IPv6 (cool), they have a good name (Portfast), and they operate out of a .CO.UK domain name (portfast.co.uk) which is something I like to see. They appear to offer a no-nonsense service, and have sensible prices.

.UK domains are priced at £6+VAT per 2 years and .EU domains are priced at £9+VAT per year.

I liked what I saw so gave them a phone call. The phone was answered quickly, and the first person I spoke to had the technical ability to use the phrase "regular expression" in the conversation, and also the ability to recognise (in about one minute of conversation, starting from cold) that I would be able to understand that phrase. With other companies, this sort of ability doesn't manifest until about third-line support. I liked what I heard, so thought I'd give them a shot.

I have now taken my .CO.UK and my .EU over to Portfast.

There was no charge for taking the .CO.UK over. There was an annual renewal charge of £9+VAT for taking over the .EU, but that is par for the course because EURid charges registrars for transfers.

The .CO.UK went over fine. But the .EU appears to have hit a snag in that all the nameservers were lost in the transfer. This meant that there were no nameservers registered, which of course will have broken the domain name's operation. Fortunately Portfast offers on-line nameserver setting, and it seems these are pushed through to the EURid WHOIS and EURid nameservers within a matter of seconds, so it was easy enough to get things going again.

I asked Portfast about the loss of nameservers, and they replied quickly to indicate that this was not something that they expected to happen, and that their systems were specifically programmed not to touch the nameserver configuration over a registrar transfer. So a bit of a mystery there.

There is still a snag though. Portfast offers on-line configuration of IPv6 glue for .UK domain names. But for .EU domains, on-line configuration of glue records for .EU domains only goes as far as IPv4 glue and does not include IPv6 glue. To Portfast's credit, this is not a limitation imposed by them but rather by OpenSRS who Portfast use to register .EU domain names.

(It is not unreasonable for registrars to subcontract .EU domain name registrations to other registrars because of the somewhat onerous terms imposed upon registrars by EURid, for example the lodging of a €10,000 deposit.)

OpenSRS do not currently support the setting up of IPv6 glue on .EU domain names via an automation interface. So .EU domain name resellers using OpenSRS cannot reasonably offer automated IPv6 glue configuration to their customers.

(Despite APNIC being a mere 10 days away from running out of IPv4 addresses completely, the world does not seem to have realised that the time for saying "Oh we'll be handling IPv6 at ... [waves hand in a dismissive fashion] ... some point in the future" has long since passed.)

So I am currently pursuing the possibility of having Portfast pursue OpenSRS to set up IPv6 glue manually.

So far, OpenSRS has replied to say that they don't support IPv6 glue on .EU domain names. Unfortunately for them, I do not believe they have the option of taking this this position because under the registrar agreement they have with EURid, they will be obliged to offer all services to customers that EURid provides. I've submitted a request to Portfast that OpenSRS be asked again, and where we are now is that that request is currently outstanding.

Thus far Portfast has been entirely helpful and professional.

So at the minute it seems that Portfast per se are absolutely fine.

The problem I have left is that OpenSRS appear to be being a bit dim.

Results so far:

Company	Summary
AAISP	Reasonable level of technical competence within the organisation, and reasonably easy to get through to technically competent people on the phone. However they do not support on-line configuration of nameservers — you have to submit a support ticket, which is quite pants. Nor do they support automated registration of new domain names — you have to put in a support ticket, which is utterly hopeless if you are looking to "grab" a domain name. A generalised lack of automation on domain name handling — "all handled through tickets". Support tickets would be fine, however it typically take 1+ business days before you even get the initial response on a ticket. UK domain names quite pricey at £12+VAT per year. I don't know if they even provide .EU domain names. Recommendation: Not good for domain name registrations on their own, but OK if buying registrations along with other services, and you aren't cost conscious.
NamesCo	Technically incompetent. Don't touch with a bargepole
Nominate a.k.a. BB-Online	Technically incompetent. Don't touch with a bargepole
Portfast	Technically competent in and of themselves. Very reasonable pricing. Portfast handles IPv6 glue on .UK domain names "natively" through their on-line system. Unfortunately Portfast uses OpenSRS for .EU domain names, and it remains to be seen how OpenSRS will behave on IPv6 glue for .EU domain names. Recommendation: Seems to be good for .UK domain name registrations; the jury is still out on .EU domain name registrations.

Where have all the good DNS registrars gone?

I have been trying to register a couple of domain names, a .CO.UK and a .EU, and have them set up with my name servers with Glue Records (IPv4 and IPv6).

Should be simple right? But it has so far turned out to be a mammoth task.

I started out by looking for a not-too-expensive registrar who could cope with .CO.UK and .EU names, and who would process the initial registration automatically (and immediately), as opposed to requiring a message to be submitted to a human for processing whenever they saw fit.

After searching around, I landed on NamesCo. Their automated system processed the initial registrations straight off.

Unfortunately they rather messed-up the registrant's (i.e. my) e-mail address as recorded with EURid, putting their own e-mail address instead of mine — VERY naughty. Also it look a LOT of jumping up on down on them via several support tickets to get this fixed. In the end it looked like they had to do (what EURid call) a "trade", presumably at their expense, to get the domain ownership transferred to me. Eh? Yes. From EURid's point-of-view, the domain wasn't actually registered to me at all! So it looks like NamesCo were being extremely naughty and registering names requested by customers to themselves — seems to me to be really quite illegal.

Anyway, I eventually got around to wanting the nameservers and Glue Records set up. So I put in two support tickets, one for each domain name.

The .CO.UK was processed correctly within one business day and I was all set.

After a while, they came back to tell me that the .EU was done. I checked. It wasn't. I queried. A different person waded in on the support ticket and made a comment that was total nonsense. I queried. They made another nonsense comment. This went back and forth a few times before the original person re-surfaced and told me to disregard all the comments from the other person, and made a comment which made sense. Professional? Not really.

This first person made some enquiries, and finally came to the conclusion that they could not support IPv6 Glue Records on .EU domain names because the company which actually processed their .EU registrations (Register.IT) did not support IPv6 Glue Records on .EU domain names.

This was bad as it was. But it was made even worse by the fact that I had deliberately asked, in a support ticket a few weeks earlier, whether they supported IPv6 Glue Records for .EU domain names. Their reply was that their ability to support IPv6 Glue Records was limited only by the ability of the relevant registry to support them. So having said "yes", they now said "no".

I checked the sample agreement which is agreed between EURid and registrars. In section 2.5 it says that registrars must offer all the services to end-users that EURid offers. I also telephoned EURid in Belgium (English +32 2 401 27 60) and asked them if they supported IPv6 Glue. The chap I spoke with didn't know, but he telephoned me back later to say that they did. So it would seem that Register.IT is actually obliged to support IPv6 Glue on .EU domains, but doesn't. So what is that? Probably a civil wrong toward EURid. Ah well.

Eventually I decided that NamesCo was not for me and started to have a look round for another registrar. After looking around I found that AAISP have a domain name "aaisp.eu", and that was registered through an outfit called Nominate.

"Nominate"? Odd. Sounds like some kind of play on "Nominet", and really quite a silly name. Ordinarily I would not have any truck with a company which (a) has such a silly name and (b) appears to be deliberately trying to confuse people into thinking it might be some other organisation (Nominet). But, I thought, hey ho, if it's good enough for AAISP, it's good enough for me.

So I spoke with Nominate to see if (a) they did deal directly with the registries Nominet and EURid, and (b) if they would support IPv6 Glue. They said that they did deal directly with those two registries. On the subject of IPv6 Glue, they said that whilst it was not something they had done much of, they did have access to most registries, and doing "unusual" things with domain registration was something that was well within the sort of thing that they would do.

So I took a chance and promptly transferred my .CO.UK and .EU to Nominate.com.

Nominate.com duly took over the domain names. I then asked them to set up the .EU with the desired nameservers and Glue Records. Within a short while they had managed to get those set up correctly. Fantastic.

At this point both domains were set up and from a DNS point of view, all correct and returning the correct nameservers and Glue Records, including IPv6 Glue Records. In addition, the information recorded with the registries legally identifying me as the registrant owner was correct. Fantastic.

So Nominate were starting to look reasonbly good.

However their web control panel does leave quite a bit to be desired. For example the Postal/geographic address bit doesn't really have the right layout for UK postal addresses, and unless you have an unusually brief address you end up having to cram it in and shove bits of the address into what is really the wrong box.

Also, Nominate are incapable of accepting e-mail addresses which don't happen to fit into their own private definition of what is acceptable. RFC5322 doesn't seem to have reached as far as Longfield, Kent, and they will not accept an e-mail address with a plus symbol in it. Clang!

Even worse was the reason they cited. Something to do with their system treating e-mail addresses as regular expressions! Bizarre! So if the e-mail address contains a plus symbol, this will be interpreted as "match one or more of the previous entity"!

Now, I can tell you, as an I.T. professional with 20 years experience in the business, that this is HIDEOUSLY, HEINOUSLY BROKEN, and indicates that their technical staff (if they have any at all) are hideously incompetent and any company that is this technically incompetent should not be touched with a bargepole.

So in summary: I'm still looking for a DNS registrar which is at least a quarter decent. If you do have any suggestions, please do let me know.

Results so far:

Company	Summary
NamesCo	Technically incompetent. Don't touch with a bargepole
Nominate a.k.a. BB-Online	Technically incompetent. Don't touch with a bargepole

Netgear DGN2200: Don't buy

Netgear DGN2200 review: Don't buy. Zero stars out of Five.

Do you do Perl? If so, you might like to try perldoc.co.uk. It's like perldoc.perl.org, only it's not perldoc.perl.org, so when perldoc.perl.org goes down, perldoc.co.uk stays up. Plus it's UK based, so for people in the UK and the rest of Europe, it should be quicker.

I bought a Netgear DGN2200 (from Amazon) to replace the DG834Gv4 which appeared to have failed (all lights coming on).

As I'm talking about two devices here with gobbledegook codenames, I'll highlight them differently in different colours. So the new (bad) one is the DGN2200, and the old (good) one is the DG834Gv4.

(As it turned out later, the DG834Gv4 hadn't failed; only the power supply had expired. By pinching the power supply from my previous-previous router (DG834Gv2), which was also 12V 1A with the same pinout, I was able to get the DG834Gv4 going again.)

Back to the DGN2200, it is a case of: Nice hardware, shame about the firmware. The DGN2200, as offered in its current form, is a load of rubbish. In a couple of years, assuming the firmware gets fixed, it could be a good little router. But today, don't touch it with a bargepole

The DGN2200 seems to incorporate a perfectly decent DSL modem. On my somewhat lengthy telephone line, I get a DSL synch rate which is in the same ball park as the best I have seen.

Also the DGN2200 seems to incorporate perfectly decent wireless hardware. As far as I could tell, all my kit seemed to connect up to it easily and maintained a reliable connection.

The problem, and it's a biggy, is the network software:

If I try to access an HTTPS website on a non-standard TCP port number, then I find that it takes 5 or 6 attempts to connect. Now, this might look like simple packet loss, or perhaps the MTU is too large. Well, sorry, no, for several reasons:

1. If I do swap test with the old DG834Gv4 router, the DGN2200 fails on this point whereas the DG834Gv4 doesn't. The DG834Gv4 connects first time, every time.

2. I can run a simultaneous ping which shows 0 out of 100 packet loss. Also I can run a simultaneous SSH session which is consistently snappy and responsive. So why do ping and other services work reliably but HTTPS (on a non-standard port number) doesn't?

3. I can take the MTU down to 1400 or 1350 and there is no difference. In any case, why does the DG834Gv4 work fine when the DGN2200 fails miserably?

I tried monitoring the HTTPS packets on the server side using tcpdump. When the problem is manifesting, the server does not see any initial packet arriving. So the server has no cause to respond. The packet is simply not arriving, and everything points to the packet being lost by the DGN2200.

More problems: If I try to set up an OpenVPN connection to a server listening on UDP port 1195, it takes 5 or 6 attempts before it connects. Packet loss or MTU? Nope, for the same reasons as the first problem. Again, the DG834Gv4 connects first time, every time.

I tried raising support requests through Netgear, but we were moving at a snail's pace, and besides I now have the old router working again.

So I have raised an RMA through Amazon and the DGN2200 is going back. Update 2010-11-04: Amazon have now issued a full refund for the unit.

In addition, I have advised Netgear that I would be more than happy to consider assisting them on a consultative basis.

If you found this posting useful, please consider donating 0.25 U.S. dollar or 0.25 Euro.

Humyo: ghastly

On the face of it, Humyo looks like quite a good idea. About £4 per month for 100GB storage.

After using it for a few days I started to run into what turned out to be a show-stopping problem.

The Humyo software takes an age "working out what has changed", and does not provide any progress indication.

I thought this was just some funny little thing about the way it worked.

That was until I tried to get my data off of Humyo again.

And he we find the rub, and it's a biggy: Humyo is slow. Deathly slow.

Retrieving a file through the DAV interface runs at about 1 Mbit/s (one megabit per second). Not even 1 Mbyte/s. Really, 1 Mbit/s (125 kbyte/s). This is even slower than my out-in-the-sticks 2 Mbit/s broadband connection.

Reporting this to Humyo tech support, at first they claimed there was "packet loss near my host". This was fine except I had run my tests from 3 different co-lo boxes, all with proved excellent connectivity. Humyo then ran tests through the HTTP (public file sharing interface) which ran more quickly. Yeeeesss, but that is public file sharing. I was talking about the private authenticated DAV interface.

If we mount up Humyo using Davfs2, and try and do any operation which enumerates the directory hierarchy, we can only go through it at about one directory per second. And this is with empty directories.

No. Humyo is utterly ghastly.

At the present time AWS S3 seems to be quite a good idea. Access to AWS S3 seems to be reasonably good from the co-lo machine.