$ host www.filepicker.io
www.filepicker.io is an alias for anycast.filepicker.io.
anycast.filepicker.io has address 174.129.254.207
Host anycast.filepicker.io not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
Host anycast.filepicker.io not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
$ host filepicker.io
Host filepicker.io not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
It would appear that fry.io is actually down. That's the one hosted with nic.io. This is why I wanted to move away from them. They are really incompetent.
I thought it was as I transferred fine.io over to someone else because I found out nic.io were storing passwords in plain text. Sadly, it seems not. It's quite frustrating to know your business is essentially at the mercy of people that don't know what they are doing.
It is not possible to move away from them. nic.io is the registry for .io domains, so you can't move to anyone else. They also act as a registrar for their own TLD, so you could move to another registrar, but ultimately they're responsible for .io delegation.
Anthony from DNSimple here. I'll pass along what I know so far: some of nic.io's name servers appear to be no longer delegating .io domains out to authoritative name servers. Some of their name servers are still delegating properly, but some are not.
This issue also affects .sh and .ac TLDs I believe since they are the same registry. If I find out anything new I'll post on Twitter in the @dnsimple account and here.
ooo, you do 301 redirects, I'll be over shortly...
To explain why that's useful, we have three domains, draw.io (mutter), diagramly.com and diagram.ly that all map to the same thing. The actual site runs on a Google App Engine appspot domain. On GAE, you have to buy a Google Apps for Business account to map a domain to an GAE appspot domain.
We have three Apps accounts because of this. We're not happy to do the 301 on a physical server, that loses the scalability advantage of GAE. This has always needed to be done at the DNS level ( I know it's not truely a DNS feature, but I'm assuming the scaling of the redirects at someone who does it as a service is better than mine ). This is the first time I've seen this service. That's all...
On top of that some customers will still end up on the name servers that are still failing, resulting in NXDOMAIN results still ending up cached in resolvers.
In some sort of irony, statuspage.io is down. Was looking at their offering about an hour ago and thinking of taking it for a spin, but now I'm not so sure...
Steve from StatusPage here -- an issue like this is extremely rare so we just haven't prioritized a solution for it. This is something we plan on being able to handle in the future.
Thanks Steve, agreed - just unfortunate that I only found your service earlier today, and when I went back the site was down :( Would having a custom domain have got around the problem, or is that a CNAME to your .io domain?
Hey Alex, Danny here from StatusPage. Agreed, not the best timing! We'll have a fix for this in the future and to answer your question, yes, a custom domain would get around the problem.
We're back online at http://candid.io. Someone on twitter posted "VCs should think twice before investing in startups without a .com" -> I think that's patently absurd. Azure, AWS, and the other 'core infrastructure' services suffer similar outages form time to time.
Yes, you're taking on a bit more risk in the short-term... but everything's a trade-off, you're getting much back for a slightly elevated risk in having a short, concise, very meaningful (in our case) name that influences adoption. There's no other alternative -> .COM is a limited resource, only reasonable assumption is that reliability of other TLDs must improve in the long run.
I hate genericized ccTLDs, but I don't think the VCs are the ones who should be avoiding them. People creating services should stick to .com, get the .net, and if they have to do something like "getdropbox.com" until they can buy dropbox.com, so be it.
Going from dropbox.io to dropbox.com is ok, but I'd probably go for getdropbox.com in preference to dropbox.io.
Well as a person hosting a service under a .io domain I must say that it's next to impossible to find a decent domain under .com these days. They are all taken by domain sharks hoarding away and running link-farms. The .io landscape is a refreshing one, it's well recognized by it's typical audience (tech people), expensive enough so that it's not attractive for the domain-sharks, and there's plenty available.
1) Once you're successful you have to get the .com/.net/etc anyway. There's a lot of ambiguouty when you say "go to my site, de.lici.o.us" (which was probably the dumbest one ever), but even saying "referly" makes me think "referly.com" more than "refer.ly". If you're going to get the gccTLD, you absolutely must have sitenameio.com too. So, it doesn't really save you from "decent domain not available" -- prefixing with "get" or "my" in .com isn't any worse.
2) ccTLD has a defined meaning -- it's the country. I don't hate ccTLDs; e.g. Amazon.co.uk makes a lot of sense for the UK site of Amazon. But when people
3) They expose you to additional risk. The US can largely shut down most things, but .ly means you're exposed to Libya (JFC! an internet business voluntarily deciding to be exposed to Libya?)
4) If you really want something other than .com, you could use another TLD. Generally they all tend to be scams (I'm not aware of many .info or .biz domain names which are anything but scams, although I guess a few single-purpose/serving sites are in .info)
In fairness, IO is actually the least objectionable of all the gccTLDs, since "IO" is a pretty bogus ISO code in terms of representing a country.
ccTLDs make sense when you want to "fly the flag" of that country, too -- wikileaks.is or wikileaks.ch makes sense. All the gccTLDs have policies which are strictly worse than .com though.
And 2-letter domains (which are mostly ccTLDs) do make sense for link shorteners, particularly temporary/transient ones.
I like .info for personal point of presence sites.. I use tracker1.info as an example.
I also do like .io for previously stated reasons by others... It's techie/geeky (I/O), and it's expensive enough that the squatters have mostly stayed away.
Unfortunately it may appear up for you and for monitoring systems yet still not resolve for others, depending on DNS cache freshness as well as which root name server you (randomly) fall on.
God dammit! You just made me realise my internet was down :-( I thought that I was just having a quiet day. So that's an entire days worth of business lost.
"Brandon Thomas is a triple major undergrad at Southern Polytechnic State University in the Computer Science, Biology, and Chemistry programs. Brand loves science, uses Linux and vim, and programs primarily in Python, Javascript, and C++. Computing interests include machine learning and computer graphics. After graduation Brand intends to study computational metabolomics or possibly found a startup company."
Yeah, I was deploying to Heroku when this roots error occurred. This screwed up the deploy (as it crashed in the middle) and just 500'ed on every page load. And meant every DNS request in my deploy chain that relied on *.notable.ac resolving ended up caching negative results. Luckily it's back up now :)
96 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] thread$ host www.filepicker.io www.filepicker.io is an alias for anycast.filepicker.io. anycast.filepicker.io has address 174.129.254.207 Host anycast.filepicker.io not found: 3(NXDOMAIN) Host anycast.filepicker.io not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
$ host filepicker.io Host filepicker.io not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
This issue also affects .sh and .ac TLDs I believe since they are the same registry. If I find out anything new I'll post on Twitter in the @dnsimple account and here.
To explain why that's useful, we have three domains, draw.io (mutter), diagramly.com and diagram.ly that all map to the same thing. The actual site runs on a Google App Engine appspot domain. On GAE, you have to buy a Google Apps for Business account to map a domain to an GAE appspot domain.
We have three Apps accounts because of this. We're not happy to do the 301 on a physical server, that loses the scalability advantage of GAE. This has always needed to be done at the DNS level ( I know it's not truely a DNS feature, but I'm assuming the scaling of the redirects at someone who does it as a service is better than mine ). This is the first time I've seen this service. That's all...
Working:
b.nic.io. ns1.communitydns.net.
Not working:
a.nic.io. a.ns13.net. b.nic.ac. b.ns13.net. ns3.icb.co.uk.
Good thing it's just some crappy side project.
Technical details of permanent delivery failure: DNS Error: Domain name not found
Just because you're exposed to some reliability risk doesn't mean that you can't expose yourself to more by using a smaller TLD.
Going from dropbox.io to dropbox.com is ok, but I'd probably go for getdropbox.com in preference to dropbox.io.
Why exactly do you hate them?
2) ccTLD has a defined meaning -- it's the country. I don't hate ccTLDs; e.g. Amazon.co.uk makes a lot of sense for the UK site of Amazon. But when people
3) They expose you to additional risk. The US can largely shut down most things, but .ly means you're exposed to Libya (JFC! an internet business voluntarily deciding to be exposed to Libya?)
4) If you really want something other than .com, you could use another TLD. Generally they all tend to be scams (I'm not aware of many .info or .biz domain names which are anything but scams, although I guess a few single-purpose/serving sites are in .info)
In fairness, IO is actually the least objectionable of all the gccTLDs, since "IO" is a pretty bogus ISO code in terms of representing a country.
ccTLDs make sense when you want to "fly the flag" of that country, too -- wikileaks.is or wikileaks.ch makes sense. All the gccTLDs have policies which are strictly worse than .com though.
And 2-letter domains (which are mostly ccTLDs) do make sense for link shorteners, particularly temporary/transient ones.
I also do like .io for previously stated reasons by others... It's techie/geeky (I/O), and it's expensive enough that the squatters have mostly stayed away.
"Brandon Thomas is a triple major undergrad at Southern Polytechnic State University in the Computer Science, Biology, and Chemistry programs. Brand loves science, uses Linux and vim, and programs primarily in Python, Javascript, and C++. Computing interests include machine learning and computer graphics. After graduation Brand intends to study computational metabolomics or possibly found a startup company."
They recently switched their backend to a new platform (May 29th) maybe this issue is related…