Many probably don't care, other than that the website is back up (which it is), but for those who are interested I thought I would try to document some of the unanticipated events which occurred.

Our website is hosted by the Association of Personal Computer User Groups (APCUG). APCUG had three internet servers in Tulsa, co-located downtown at Murcom in the ONEOK building, 100 West Fifth. Those servers were installed when I was chairman of APCUG's OnLine Service Committee (OLS).

The current OLS Chairman (Ken) decided to combine the functions of all three servers onto one server (the newest one, which I installed shortly before I was relieved as OLS Chairman). I supported the consolidation, in fact it was what I planned to do before I was replaced, and I had already started working on the consolidation.

I like to think that had I done the consolidation when I started it, things would have gone smoother, but since my crystal ball is broken, I cannot be sure the transition would have been uneventful. It is possible that unanticipated events might have disrupted my consolidation, just as they did this time.

Our website, as well as the APCUG website, and the websites of about 40 other APCUG user groups used to be hosted on a very old server, manufactured by HP. We called the server Tulsa1, and it had an IP address of 207.12.255.171, and it also was the master (Primary) for APCUG's Domain Name Server (DNS). Ken's plan was to move both the DNS and all websites to our newest server, which I assembled from parts I bought here in town, at the former DoItPC. We called it Tulsa3, and it had an IP address of 207.12.255.173.

One must have at least two DNS Servers, and when I was OLS Chair I arranged for our DNS to have secondary (Slave) Name Servers at two different ISPs. One was one at a company where an APCUG director use to work, and the other was at Geotec, a local Tulsa ISP at the time. Since that time the APCUG director changed jobs, and we did not know how to contact the people at that ISP to get them to make changes, and Geotec went out of business. We were able to survive with just one Name Server, but we could not make changes without at least two Name Servers we could control. I had planned on installing another APCUG DNS at a server we have in Colorado, which hosts the APCUG WebBoard service, but the new OLS Chairman did not see that as a high priority, and hence it never got done.

Ken's original plan was to transfer all of the files to Tulsa3 (which worked fine), but he also had to set up the control files for the new sites (this is something I tried to figure out how to transfer, but was unable to do so, which is why I did not complete the consolidation when I was in charge). There was no way to test these new structures without moving the DNS pointers, but that would have been fairly easy to fix, however for some reason Ken decided to completely restructure the DNS on the new server, and must have made some mistakes in the new DNS structure.

The best way to test the new DNS would be to use a different domain name, i.e. one that was not currently in use, and when I was OLS Chair I had registered several domain names that we were not currently using: apcug.net, apcug.com, acug.org, and acug.net. Unfortunately there were some APCUG Directors who felt threatened by the fact that I was putting in many more hours a month than they were, and so they persuaded the APCUG President to restrict my powers, and therefore I was required to set up a former Director as the Administrative Contact (the person who must approve any changes) for the domain names, and a different person (the treasurer) as the Billing Contact, and all I could set up for myself was to be the Technical Contact: someone who could initiate changes, which would have to be approved the the Admin Contact, and who did not know when the domain needed to be renewed (those notices went to the Billing Contact).

Also for some foolish reason, even though they allowed me to register the alternate domain names with Inexpensive Domains, they insisted I leave apcug.org registered with Network Solutions. The last time I made any changes at Network Solutions, they had to be done by sending email from a specific email address, and they would then send an email asking for approval to the Admin Contact, and when he authorized the change, then it would be done (Inexpensive Domains had a nice control panel which made the changes much easier to make). Unfortunately the APCUG President made me use an apcug.org email address, rather than my personal address, because she thought it "looked more professional", and by the time we got around to needing to make changes, the apcug.org email addresses no longer worked (see the discussion a little later in this article about our needing to move our mail facilities from Virginia). Fortunately she was willing for the former Director who was the Admin Contact to use his personal address, and he was able to set up the necessary capabilities for us to use Inexpensive Domain's recently installed Control Panel (similar to the one that Inexpensive Domains has had all along, but much harder to use).

The alternate domains expired on March 1. Notice was sent to the Billing Contact, who asked what we should do, and I told her to renew them. Unfortunately she did not just tell me, but rather the entire Board of Directors and Board of Advisors, plus the former Director who was the Administrative Contact, and many of those who had no idea why we had those domains made conflicting recommendations as to whether we should renew or not, and so she never did renew them.

The registrations expired March 1, and there was a 30 day grace period which expired on April 1, after which the domain went into "redemption"...we still owned it, but it was "locked". And as luck would have it, shortly after the alternate domain names disappeared into "redemption" was when Ken decided to initiate the changes to the web site. When I went into Inexpensive Domains (the Domain Registrar) to try to find the alternate domain name apcug.net, I couldn't find it. I thought maybe Ken had changed the password, but he said he hadn't. Then I discovered that Inexpensive Domains, which had been working under the auspices of Tucows (SRS) had become an ICANN Accredited Registrar on their own in January, 2003 and they were slowly moving domains from the Registrar Tucows (SRS) [Registrar Tag R11-LROR]

to their own Registrar Tag [R128-LROR] under @Com Technology as domains came due for renewal.

For about a year when you went to their site to make a change to your domain, they had two separate prompts: one for domains registered before January, 2003, and hence which were still with SRS, and a different one for domains registered after that date, and hence were with @com.

But for some reason around the first of April they changed their control screen, and it became very difficult to find the link to check on an SRS domain.

And even when I found the link, I could not find the domain name (because it had gone into "redemption"). No one else could have it, but even I could not see it. We had to bail it out of redemption (at a cost of $125.00) and even then it was several days before we could see it.

I had a similar difficulty doing updates to the TCS.ORG domain. It still had four months to go before it needed to be renewed, so it was not in "redemption", but I still needed to use the old SRS login, and it was very difficult to find that link ( https://secure.inexpensivedomains.com/cgi-bin/manage.srs.cgi) on their new site.

The best thing for us to do would have been wait until we resolved the problem with the alternate domain names, and then use them to test things, but unfortunately the gentleman who was hosting APCUG's email and ListServ services on his server in Virginia got a contract with the Department of Defense, and DoD insisted that the only servers in his building had to be DoD related, so he needed us to move those services to another server. Ken located a host for those services, but for some reason he did not think we could just point an MX record from our DNS to their server (like we had for the guy in Virginia), and so he felt he had to rush the Tulsa reorganization and do everything (new DNS, new server, and move the email) at the same time.

By this time the Virginia server was down, and hence all of the apcug.org email addresses and lists. I implemented a temporary solution on my HTWEB server, which is a part of HelpingTulsa, using my donsingleton.net domain name, and created some aliases by which the Board could still communicate with each other.

We could still communicate with each other, but the public would not be able to reach us, so Ken proceeded switching the servers.

Now that we had access to make changes on our DNS at Network Solutions we probably should have just changed the pointers there to APCUG's name server on 207.12.255.173, and then when things did not work we could have changed them back. If we had first changed the TTL (Time To Live) setting in our DNS to a low value, we could have tested things, discovered they were not working, and changed them back, and the APCUG site would have just been down for a short period of time (whatever we set TTL to be). However I knew that would mean that all of the websites we hosted for UGs (like the TCS one) would need to make changes at the group's domain registrar, so I foolishly encouraged Ken to just change the IP addresses on the two servers, so that the new one was 209.12.255.171, and the old one was something else.

That did keep some of the UG websites up (those that were using their Domain Registrar's DNS servers, and which just set their domain to point to 209.12.255.171), but TCS and a few others had set their domains to use APCUG's Name Servers,

and they had problems, which meant both the APCUG.ORG website, the TCS.ORG website, and several others, became unavailable for several days while Ken tried to fix the DNS problems.

If you have an operational Primary Name Server, with operational Secondaies, and if you have lowered your TTL value, you can make simple domain name changes quickly, but when you are trying to set up new nameservers, and having problems there, it takes 12 to 24 hours before those changes become effective, and we had problems trying to figure out how to get name servers recognized as valid " authoritative" name servers.

I don't know whether anyone will wade through this rambling explanation, but if anyone does, at least you now have some idea why our website was down for so long. The good thing is it is up now, and should remain up.

I postponed renewing the TCS.ORG domain (it had four months left on it) while the site was down, because I knew it took a few days, and I wanted to be sure I could reach it to make any changes that might be required, but now that APCUG has everything working, I renewed the domain so that it would be transferred to InexpensiveDomain's @COM service, with my other domains.

For more information on the Tulsa Computer Society click here