Let's say you've got a CNAME record pointing a subdomain to a different server, like for instance 'blog' goes to 'ghs.google.com.' It works, blog.yourdomain.com goes to a blogspot blog like it's supposed to. Eveyone's happy.

Now suppose, hypothetically, your website host upgrades the hardware everything is on, and the CNAME record gets flipped, so 'ghs.google.com.' is now pointing to 'blog'.

That record isn't valid now. So when it propogates, is it possible that some DNS servers would recognize the broken-ness and keep the old record, while some DNS servers would either delete the record, or overwrite it with a non-functional record?

Static just reminded me this morning that he can't see my blog. I also got an update from another reader that it disappeared for her, too. She said it had disappeared two weeks ago, it came back for a while, and now it's gone again.

I'm really close to just dropping my host entirely. At least with a new host I know I'd be starting from scratch and figure everything out. With this upgrade, I keep finding new ways it's broken, and they keep changing my files to "fix" it.

I fixed the config, and now someone who couldn't see it this morning is seeing it again. Yippee.

Now I just need to find out:
* What user 'cron' runs as
* Whether cron is, in fact, running at all
* What the valid path(s) is/are for: the webserver, my user, and whatever cron runs as
* How to update the php.ini so it includes the PEAR extensions
* How to search my email, like I used to be able to do
* How to view the members of an email group
* How to set the 'from' address on my email, like I used to be able to do
* How to migrate my (restored) databases to the new MySql5 server without breaking everything

And by the way, when you specifically claim that one of the benefits of the email upgrade is "enhanced search capabilities", you might want to have, you know, enhanced the search capabilities somewhat.

They've completely fucked up my DNS records. Primary domain is misconfigured, blog subdomain is somehow returning an app I don't have installed, mx records are all misconfigured. This is total bullshit.

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Okay, I know what it was showing. When I set the site up 2+ years ago, I tried out a self-hosted blog before deciding on Blogger. That file was left over in a directory I never cleared out. At least it gives me a chance to tell people I'm having problems.

What pisses me off is I can see from my statistics that everything went dark right after I made that "fix" yesterday at 4.

Here's what it looks like now:

http://cooklikeyourg...s/zone-record.png

The two CNAME records in the yellow box are the ones I "fixed" at 4 yesterday. They both had the "Your Host" and the "IP Address/Hostname" values reversed.

The three MX records in the blue box all looked right at 4, but now you can see the "Your Host" field is blank, and the "Priority" field has "cooklikeyourgrandmother.com." "Your Host" should be "webmail" (I think), and "Priority" should be a number.

The CNAME in the red box also looks wrong, because according to a note lower down on the screen:

http://cooklikeyourg...es/aplus/note.png

There's no one there now who can read a zone file and know what it's supposed to look like, and there aren't even any supervisors in who can escalate the ticket. "24 x 7 support" apparently means "as long as nothing is actually wrong."

I've told them three times, just let me talk to a sysadmin and we'll have this fixed in two minutes. But their customer "support" policy says I'm not allowed to talk to anyone except the tier 1 people. They'll take the information and forwarded it to the appropriate people.

The last four times I've called, first thing I've done is ask them to read back what the last person forwarded. And all except the last time it's been wrong. And they keep closing it as "resolved" when we make a change, but before we find out if it fixed the problem. The last change clearly broke it.

Their DNS manager app is completely broken, and they won't listen when I tell them I need a sysadmin to manually fix my zone file.