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Skriven 2007-12-31 04:13:29 av FidoNews Robot (2:2/2.0)
Ärende: FidoNews 24:53 [03/06]: General Articles
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GENERAL ARTICLES
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FTSC.ORG secured
By Michiel van der Vlist
FTSC administrator (2:2/20)
Until this morning, the ftsc.org domain was in the custody of George
Roberts who was an FTSC member from March 2003 until June 2005. George
has left FidoNet but the control over the domain remained in his
hands. George also hosted the ftsc website.
As often happens, when George left FidoNet his priorities shifted. He
was difficult to reach to say it mildly. It was decided that it was
best if the the control of the domain would be in the hands of whoever
became the new FTSC administrator. This was a couple of weeks before
the FTSC administrator election. Several people tried to contact
George and I think it was Janis Kracht who first got hold of him on
the telephone. He was cooperative and willing to part with the domain.
His company was shifting interest and wanted to get out of the hosting
business anyway, so transferring the domain and have someone else host
the fstc website was fine with him. That was in October. In the
meantime I was elected ftsc administrator so it was my turn.
Well... I found out that transferring a domain is not all that easy.
What is needed is lots of cooperation from the incumbent. A good
thing, you do not want someone to hijack your domain from under you do
you? But it is a bit of a hurdle if the incumbent has other
priorities. The normal procedure for a transfer is that one asks one's
registrar to initiate the transfer. But before that, the current owner
of the domain must unlock it. As long as it is locked, no transfer is
possible at all. At least that is how it is for .org domains. Other
TLDs have other rules and procedures. The lock status is visible in
the whois record and apparentlty George had already unlocked it. So I
told my registrar (EuroDns) to go ahead. And then the trouble started.
What I learned is this:
Sometimes domain registrars have a contract with the authority
handling the administration of the top level domain, but most of the
time they are subcontractors of a company that handles large amounts
of domains. For .org domains Eurodns acts as a subcontractor for
Dotregistrar. And apparently the two had some kind of a issue between
them so that Eurodns could not do .org domain transfers. At least that
is what a help desk employee at Eurodns told me when I tried to
transfer ftsc.org to my eurodns account and got an error message. He
added that he could not give a date at which the problem would be
solved.
When I told them that in that case, I had no choice but to take my
business elsewhere as I could not afford to wait for them to sort
things out. The domain would expire in Januari and I would in all
likehood lose it if the transfer was not completed by then. The the
guy at Eurodns said that if it was only one domain he could do the
transfer by hand. So I told him to go ahead. That was third week of
October. It was then that I learned aout EPP codes, the guy said he
needed an EPP code that had to be issued by the current registrar. And
so I asked George for the EPP.
That took about two weeks. On November 2nd I got an e-mail from
InterJuncture - George's company - with a 16 digit hex number that was
to be used as the authorisation code for the transfer. By that time
the guy at EuroDns was no longer at his desk, but it seemed they had
solved the problem with Dotregistrar and automated transfer was on
again. Or so their website indicated. So I went trough the motions,
did some mouse clicks, was asked for and entered the EPP code and all
seemed well. Appearances can be deceptive.
Nothing happened. My account at Eurodns flagged the domain as "in
transfer" but nothing happened.
Their FAQ said it could take up to ten days, so after the ten days
expired, I started queering the guys at the help desk again and I got
another fellow who was somewhat less cooperative. He told me I had to
reapply for the domain. That did not work. He then told me to reset it
which did not work either. He reset it for me and I reapplied. Drew a
blank again. The clock was ticking. It took another two weeks for them
to admit that they could not do it at all. Maybe in 2008 they said. It
was then that I decided to do what I probably should have done right
away: take my bussines elsewhere. That was beginning of december.
So I started shopping for another domain registrar and landed with a
small Dutch company. Doing business with a Dutch company has the
advantage of not being hampered by language barrier and ease of
payment, No credit card needed, just an account at a Dutch bank. On
the downside: for a contract to be valid under Dutch law a signature
on ink on real paper is required. Plus a copy of a valid ID. That
means snail mail and so *time*. It took a couple of days to create the
account. The calender showed first week of december. I re-initiated
the transfer and after a few days the feedback was that the EPP code
was no longer valid. Apparently it had expired. :-(
So I had to ask George for a new EPP code.... <sigh>
The clock was ticking, the domain was to expire on jan 23rd 2008. I
was getting worried...
I have to say George was more responsive this time. I got the new code
december 23nd. And so I told the guys at StartHosting, my new domain
registrar, to go ahead. On dec 24 I got their confirmation that the
transfer was in progress...
Their FAQ says it can take up to five days, but as it was holiday
time, I expected a few more delays. I kept a close eye on the whois
record but nothing much other than flagging it as "in transfer"
showed. Until this morning, and low and behold, there is my name and
address and the registrar is Starthosting and I have the passwords for
manipulating the A, CNAME and MX records.
Wow. Finally.
On behalf of the FTSC I thank George Roberts for taking care of the
domain and hosting the website for all these years. I send him an
e-mail to that effect.
Michiel van der Vlist
FTSC administrator.
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Z2PNT Pointlist Distribution
By Ulrich Schroeter
2:244/1120
Before i'll announce the reestablishment of the Z2PNT distribution
within Zone 2, i'll try to add some words.
In the european Fidonet history, Points are an essential part
of the Fidonet community. Before entering a Fidonet Node
most of the European sysops had installed a Point package.
A mailer, a tosser and an message editor.
I don't know any sysop who has installed his Node from scratch
without a Point package running on his system before.
In Europe we call this the Point school of Fidonet where the
potential new Fidonet sysops get their knowledge about Fidonet.
Learning the Netiquette and much others and getting familiar
with the software.
All the time, Points fills the Echoes with life. Without
Points the traffic is noticable to a lesser extent.
As Points has gone, the regional Echoes becomes orphan.
As a sample: todays dayly traffic in German Echoes is
about 100-150 mails per day only in one echo. A chat Echo
were predominant Points are writing.
The historical reasons, why Point support was no option
in Zone 1 is the fact, that in the growing years of Fidonet
within Zone 2 the telco providers uses a different bill schema.
The so called local calling areas in Zone 1 doesn't exists
within Zone 2. The user had to pay for each minute he calls.
The bill was uncalculatable. So the alternate for online users
was to use a offline technique. This was the step Point
packages were distributed to online users who are interested
in Echomail and Fileecho distributions.
In the old days of Fidonet Points are smiled at. The technical
environment with 2D akas aren't Point friendly so they had to
use Fakenets to communicate with mailers of Nodes.
May be, this had the smell of imperfectly installations.
Since 4D akas were installed, a Point addressing and routing
works w/o any Fakenets. Despite ourselves there was no
usable Pointlist creation tool available. The old MakeNl
doesn't fit. Only with Fake(d)nets.
As Joachim Homringhausen has introduced the Boss Pointlist format
there was an alternate solution in listing Points without
any redundancy. But there was no tool available to install a
functional Pointlist distribution. About 10 years later around
2000, Regions moved on more and more to a Boss format distribution
of Pointlists. In the meanwhile there are a few Pointlists
compilers available.
Every Zone 2 Region have had their own Pointlist format
distribution. i.e. R24 uses the Fakenet Pointlist for
distribution over a long time. Pointlist converter tools helps
to convert between the different Pointlist formats (see FTS-5002).
Around 2000 Alexey Antonyuk from Region 50 starts collecting
the Regional Pointlist segments and compile it to the first
Zone 2 wide Pointlist named Z2PNT.
Alexey uses a Poss format - a mixture between the Boss format
with the statusflag Point from the Point format list as used by
the mailer BINK+.
The distribution of the Z2PNT and the Diffs Z2PNT_D becomes
unreliable. Often a 4 weeks frequency was between each
distribution. As of a ZIA listing dispute with the ZC Alexey
resigns as the first ZPK.
To continue the Z2PNT distribution i've stepped in to compile
a fresh new Z2PNT before ending 2007 because i've allways
collect Regional Pointlist segments for the Fido-History-Project
(see Fidonews 11/07 FNEWSO11). Most files are stored allways on
my system ,-)
The format i've changed to the raw Boss format as of the
status field redundancy.
The weekly distribution of Z2PNT 2nd generation is now installed
at 2:244/1120. The first official distribution was #355/07.
The filedistribution is installed with the Fileechoes:
* Z2PNT Z2PNT.Z## (Zip) includes Z2PNT.### (the whole list)
* Z2PNT_D Z2PNT_D.Z## (Zip) includes Z2PNT_D.### (the Diffs)
and for receiving Regional segments thru the Fileecho
* Z2PNTSEG R##PNT.Z## (Zip) or any other format.
Every RPK who is interested in participating the Z2PNT
distribution can contact me via netmail:
Ulrich Schroeter, 2:244/1120
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