Many moons ago I found an online web hosting company called Hosting4Less.com. They had good service and I established a domain with them on behalf of one of my family members. Everything was going swimmingly until a dust-up started me looking for other web hosting providers. The web hosting market is jammed packed with competitors. The people at Hosting4Less can’t compete with the service I found, called iPage. Moving this domain however was less than easy.

The domain was managed by a bulk-domain registrar “OpenSRS” something or other. In order to get the domain transferred to a new domain registrar I needed a password, a Domain Transfer Password. It took me 2 weeks to wheedle this sucker out from the previous domain registrar and then email it to everyone trying to help me. The domain transfer failed 3 times, and on the 4th it was half-way there, some sort of mutant half-life – living between domain registrars. After asking for help a 4th time the fine people at iPage did get it resolved for me, but the domain was evidently “Locked”, so I had to get a username and password, log into manage.opensrs.net and unlock the domain and change the domains nameservers.

Each step is predicated on a drug-addled pharmacy structure – we’ll get around to it either in 1 hour, or 7 days depending on how much crack we have to smoke. There is no rhyme or reason, I think they put these obnoxious time estimates down to avoid people from going completely apeshit when one change can take a week for someone to pay attention to.

The Domain Naming System is secure, I have no doubt about that. How is this security vouchsafed? It’s soaked in various username/password combinations (160 bits of security on that password!) but most of all it is a bureaucratic abyss. You stare into it and it stares right back into you, alternately claiming and then blasting your soul into teeny tiny little shreds. I can’t imagine anything being constructed this way. It is as if they placed a scapegoat at the village doors, hung the word efficiency on it’s neck and left it to wander off during a blizzard with a million ravenous wolves running around. It’s designed to be obtuse, the road is not so much a road as it is little strands of pavement showing you where the potholes are, as they are the majority of ‘road’ and each one is big enough to grab a tire and pop off an axle! It’s as if a paranoid schizophrenic was given the keys to the kingdom and let to go on a security rampage. Nothing about this makes any sense to me, so I must have faith that each wave of my feather-and-chicken-bone dreamcatcher gets me all that closer to my target, which is to have domain.com point to IP-Address-That’s-Right.

Nobody should worry about terrorists subverting the DNS system, even with virgins promised, nothing can be proper compensation for this bureaucratic nightmare! Damn!