Damn French!
For the most part, I like France. Its a nice place to visit, most of the people that I’ve met have been fairly nice, at least the ones that have come over here to study and visit. Heck, I even got engaged over there back in 1999.
However, today re-affirmed why most people hate the french. We have a few domains that are registered with a registrar that is based out of Paris France. We bought the company that used this registrar so this is some of the cleanup that just hasn’t happened over the years.
Today apparently they decided that one of our primary domains hadn’t had its whois information updated so it must be out of date which would put us in violation of the terms of service. Technically, the whois information was still 100% correct. The contacts were are still valid contacts handled by our NOC staff. The contact names, phone numbers and email addresses all still worked as you would expect them to. But since we haven’t made any updates, clearly it must be out of date so they removed the domain from the root servers. No notifications that this was being done, no notice that we needed to update our records, nothing! Another joy of dealing with this registrar, they only do email support. That’s right, no phone support is available. Awesome!
Needless to say, we’re filing complaints with ICANN and will hopefully have this issue resolved shortly. Once it is cleared up, you can bet your ass we’re dumping them. Or, as many of our staff have suggested, threatening to invade their country and expecting their unconditional surrender. 😉