Fortunately, we were able to track down the right people at Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) and our domain problems have been taken care of. Whois information may not be completely updated until Tuesday but we're told that any disruption to our domain is extremely unlikely.
This was a very interesting situation as it illustrated a rare problem that occurs occasionally with domain registrations. This particular one seems to have been triggered back in June 2000. That's when someone managed to transfer our domain records over to register.com using forged email. We quickly got it back and had register.com transfer our records back to NSI. But that was only the beginning.
Something apparently didn't quite work right on NSI's end. We were able to track down a "whois" output from December, which showed NSI as the registrar but also gave a peculiar error:
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Domain not found locally, but Registry points back to local DB.
Local whois DB must be out of date.
Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the .com, .net, and .org domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
Domain Name: 2600.COM
Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
Referral URL: www.networksolutions.com
Name Server: FOO.NOTWORK.NET
Name Server: PHALSE.2600.COM
Updated Date: 29-jun-2000
>>> Last update of whois database: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 11:02:17 EST <<<
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Initially, NSI told us they had no record of our even being registered with them, despite the information above. From the explanation we eventually got from the techies at NSI, we had been entered into the registry database but not into NSI's internal cosmetic database. This resulted in our site both existing and not existing at the same time. We never got any notification when the domain was set to expire since we didn't exist in the billing section. So the domain magically became available and was quickly grabbed by someone else. Fortunately, it was registered under NSI once more which probably simplified the process of getting it back.
We have to acknowledge that NSI did a great job fixing the problem once it became clear to the right people what the problem was. We suggest keeping an eye out for this weird condition which could strike any site, particularly when domains are being transferred to different registrars. If your site appears to exist and not exist at the same time, you can be sure trouble is on the horizon.
