Recovering nsrd.info

Regular visitors will have noticed that nsrd.info has been down quite a lot over the last week.

I’m pleased to say it wasn’t a data loss situation, but it was one of those pointed reminders that just because something is in “the cloud” doesn’t mean it’s continuously available.

In the interests of transparency, here’s what happened:

• The nsrd.info domain, it turned out, was due for renewal December 2014.
• I didn’t get the renewal notification. Ordinarily you’d blame the registrar for that, but I’m inclined to believe the issue sits with Apple Mail. (More of that anon.)
• My registrar did a complimentary one year renewal for me even without charging me, so nsrd.info got extended until December 2015.
• I did get a renewal notification this year and I’d even scheduled payment, but in the meantime because it was approaching 12 months out of renewal, whois queries started showing it as having a pendingDelete status.
• My hosting service monitors whois and once the pendingDelete status was flagged stopped hosting the site. Nothing was deleted, just nothing was served.
• I went through the process of redeeming the domain on 10 November, but it’s taken this long to get processing done and everything back online.

So here’s what this reinforced for me:

1. It’s a valuable reminder of uptime vs availability, something I’ve always preached: It’s easy in IT to get obsessed about uptime, but the real challenge is achieving availability. The website being hosted was still up the entire time if I went to the private URL for it, but that didn’t mean anything when it came to availability.
2. You might be able to put your services in public-cloud like scenarios, but if you can’t point your consumers to our service, you don’t have a service.
3. In an age where we all demand cloud-like agility, if it’s something out of the ordinary domain registrars seemingly move like they’re wading through treacle and communicating via morse code. (It took almost 4 business days, three phone calls and numerous emails to effectively process one domain redemption.)
4. Don’t rely on Apple’s iCloud/MobileMe/.Mac mail for anything that you need to receive.

I want to dwell on the final point for a bit longer: I use Apple products quite a bit because they suit my work-flows. I’m not into (to use the Australian vernacular), pissing competitions about Apple vs Microsoft or Apple vs Android, or anything vs Apple. I use the products and the tools that work best for my work-flow, and that usually ends up to be Apple products. I have an iPad (Pro, now), an Apple Watch, an iMac, a MacBook Pro and even my work laptop is (for the moment) a MacBook Air.

But I’m done – I’m really done with Apple Mail. I’ve used it for years and I’ve noticed odd scenarios over the years where email I’ve been waiting for hasn’t arrived. You see, Apple do public spam filtering (that’s where you see email hitting your Junk folder), and they do silent spam filtering.  That’s where (for whatever reason), some Apple filter will decide that the email you’ve been sent is very likely to be spam and it gets deleted. It doesn’t get thrown into your Junk folder for you to notice later, it gets erased. Based on the fact I keep all of my auto-filed email for a decade and the fact I can’t find my renewal notification last year, that leaves me pointing the finger for the start of this mess at Apple. Especially when, while trying to sort it out, I had half a dozen emails sent from my registrar’s console to my @me.com account only to have them never arrive. It appears Apple thinks my registrar is (mostly) spam.

My registrar may be slow to process domain redemptions, but they’re not (mostly) spam.

A year or so ago I started the process of migrating my email to my own controlled domain. I didn’t want to rely on Google because their notion of privacy and my notion of privacy are radically different, and I was trying to reduce my reliance on Apple because of their silent erasure habit, but the events of the last week have certainly guaranteed I’ll be completing that process.

And, since ultimately it’s still my fault for having not noticed the issue in the first place (regardless of what notifications I got), I’ve got a dozen or more calendar reminders in place before the next time nsrd.info needs to be renewed.