Out the front I saw all these boxes being unloaded by the truckload. I asked what they were all for and was told that this is for the Wimax deployment. Wimax which is pronounce “Tian Xian” in Chinese or literally “Sky Line”, sky as in that sometimes blue thing above us and line as in cable. Our data centre has already been running trials for the past 2 years and I have peeked at their equipment with much excitement.

It turns out that the trials were a success and the stuff is being fully deployed now!

And yes, the mice were quite well behaved.

I hate to bitch. And I hate to appear as if I am drumming up business or trying to screw other businesses. I am just trying to call it as I see it as a public service.

We get maybe 3-4 clients a week transfer to us from a very prominent and large Chinese domain registrar and hoster, I won’t say the name. But your guess is probably correct.

Apart from the issues mentioned above, the latest fiasco involves again transferring domain names AND DNS.

Issue One:

Anyone who has worked in IT for a while and manages IT, or at least has half a brain, can understand the confusion that a lower case “L” and the numeral “One” and and upper case “I” can cause. l1I in some fonts.

I have had a domain transfer request reject THREE TIMES because no matter how clear I write down the authorisation codes, that are issued by said registrar – when they eventually get the transfer request from my new registrar they reject the very same code! :-\

C’mon already, think people! Or at the very least set your random number generator to exclude those characters. God knows when I get a password failure, I take 2 mins and check for things like the above or even a six “6″ and a lower case B “b” too, before I go back whinging that the code “didn’t work…”

It reminds me of people that when you call a wrong number, just say, sorry wrong number and hang up! Thus requiring me to call them back AGAIN to see if it was indeed the wrong number (as given to me) or if I just dialled it wrong. How hard is it to get the logic of checking what number the wrong caller was trying to call before hanging up??

Issue Two:

DNS server re-delegation. I won’t go into the details here. If you are in the business, you will get the subtleties of it. The dance that involves old and new mail servers, old and new DNS servers, propagation times, TTL values, client usage, abandoned/orphaned email, etc..

Point is, you need to plan it right.

We do.

So after the usual 500 pages of chopped and stamped paper that has gone through the usual 500 people of whom no one can take responsibility to make a decision, they (aforementioned very large and famous Chinese registrar and hoster) agree to a 9PM Friday night change.

So what do they do come 9PM Friday night?

Nothing.

Then to make it worse – hey at least we could have rescheduled. They just assumed it would be OK to go ahead and change it anyway on Monday morning.  More likely they would not want to admit to an error so as to not “lose face” and in the process lose much more face by turning things into a dog’s breakfast.   FUBAR!

The lesson to be learned? One of the very largest and most famous Chinese registrars and hosters, does not even know themselves the intricacies of their products and services and the importance of the correct and attendant management of them.

As I mentioned before, don’t risk you company’s DNS or domain name by letting them manage it. If someone can’t take DNS and registration seriously – then they are a serious risk to your business continuity.

This week, via the trickle down effect in the echelons of the China network, we got informed that a couple of our clients are not compliant and they need to become so, or remove their website.

We have had to remove some clients sites before because they did not have the correct ICP. They could not get one because they did not have the correct business licences for the type of work they did.

Anyway, while having an ICP is a delicate balance between business licences, residential permits, correct content, correctly licenced IDC and what not, it is a good thing to get done and host in China. To be official, legit and free to get on with doing business.

For the most part getting an ICP, or the existence of an ICP is not a barrier to hosting or a problem to comply with. It sounds a whole lot more draconian than it really is. However it is a hassle. For you China hands, “mafan si le”!

It seems that you need a Yahoo ID to use Flickr. And no matter how or where I click to sign up for Yahoo, be it .com.au or .com or .com.hk, I get redirected to the China site…. what Yaahoo?? Only Chinese speaking people live in China?

BTW, I could sign up with Yahoo in Australia, I have the technical ability to forge packets and spoof IP’s and make that happen. However that is not the point. Even google offers an “in English” link on their page for all other languages when you connect

Seems to have been some already today…. had one major CNC outage to one of CANDIS’ data centres and it knocked out some services. Various parties claimed it was a DDOS attack – however that is the 10th one this year…this time, our monitors in Shanghai and Hong Kong also detected an anomaly separate to our Beijing links. Which are multi-homed so what gives? We all know what gives.. I was being rhetorical.

PS: If visual representation of data is a totally foriegn concept to you, look around 10:12 AM to 10:35 AM today on the RRD graph.