One Last Try to Know Why.
February 19, 2021 8:13 PM Subscribe
So, back on February 10th, I asked for help here with an issue regarding my Network Solutions account. Maybe somebody here can help me. It seems simple enough.
But this problem, which they admit is theirs, has been unfixable for nearly 10 days. It doesn't help that with each shift change, everybody looks in the Men in Black mind eraser and nobody seems to know what my problem is each time I've called.
As I understand it, a website I created with their website builder goes to a link Network Solutions created in lieu of assigning my website its domain name. Here is their link - http://045d9c9.netsolhost.com/. If you click it, it seems to go to a location on the Internet.
The domain name I've paid for that should be attached to that link is http://www.kkar.org.
But for SOME reason, they aren't able to make their link work with my domain name. And, weirdly, they suspended my account (the one that wasn't working) because they said somebody was using it to send spam to their other customers. A customer service rep solved that problem though she didn't know why it happened.
Now, with her help, the site is supposedly pointing to that name. But when I click the intended site URL, nothing.
Can somebody tell me why? And is this an easy fix or not? I mean, is it something I can do, since it seems to be beyond them.
As I understand it, a website I created with their website builder goes to a link Network Solutions created in lieu of assigning my website its domain name. Here is their link - http://045d9c9.netsolhost.com/. If you click it, it seems to go to a location on the Internet.
The domain name I've paid for that should be attached to that link is http://www.kkar.org.
But for SOME reason, they aren't able to make their link work with my domain name. And, weirdly, they suspended my account (the one that wasn't working) because they said somebody was using it to send spam to their other customers. A customer service rep solved that problem though she didn't know why it happened.
Now, with her help, the site is supposedly pointing to that name. But when I click the intended site URL, nothing.
Can somebody tell me why? And is this an easy fix or not? I mean, is it something I can do, since it seems to be beyond them.
It appears that the DNS for the site KKAR.ORG has not been republished to update the wider internet to this location?
206.188.193.63. is that site, and will respond when asked to provide that site.
But the DNS servers on the wider internet do not know that. My local DNS thinks it's at:
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.kkar.org. 10 IN A 198.105.254.23
www.kkar.org. 10 IN A 198.105.244.23
So your domain naming provider running *.worldnic.com (network solutions as well, or another service?) needs to "republish" the updated IP address of your site.
posted by nickggully at 9:09 PM on February 19, 2021
206.188.193.63. is that site, and will respond when asked to provide that site.
But the DNS servers on the wider internet do not know that. My local DNS thinks it's at:
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.kkar.org. 10 IN A 198.105.254.23
www.kkar.org. 10 IN A 198.105.244.23
So your domain naming provider running *.worldnic.com (network solutions as well, or another service?) needs to "republish" the updated IP address of your site.
posted by nickggully at 9:09 PM on February 19, 2021
I currently get a NXDOMAIN (non-existent domain) response to DNS queries for both www.kkar.org and kkar.org if I query my usual DNS server.
If instead I direct those DNS queries to either ns95.worldnic.com or ns96.worldnic.com, which are the name servers listed in the WHOIS information for kkar.org, I see both kkar.org and www.kkar.org resolving to 206.188.193.63, the same address that 045d9c9.netsolhost.com resolves to through my usual DNS server.
The WHOIS for worldnic.com shows that it belongs to Network Solutions.
So it looks like the right DNS A records are already in place on Network Solutions's own DNS servers, they're just not being revealed to the rest of the world.
This is consistent with the serverHold status currently being shown in the WHOIS for kkar.org.
So I'm guessing that the customer service rep who unblocked your account didn't actually get as far as lifting its serverHold status.
posted by flabdablet at 12:23 AM on February 20, 2021 [4 favorites]
If instead I direct those DNS queries to either ns95.worldnic.com or ns96.worldnic.com, which are the name servers listed in the WHOIS information for kkar.org, I see both kkar.org and www.kkar.org resolving to 206.188.193.63, the same address that 045d9c9.netsolhost.com resolves to through my usual DNS server.
The WHOIS for worldnic.com shows that it belongs to Network Solutions.
So it looks like the right DNS A records are already in place on Network Solutions's own DNS servers, they're just not being revealed to the rest of the world.
This is consistent with the serverHold status currently being shown in the WHOIS for kkar.org.
So I'm guessing that the customer service rep who unblocked your account didn't actually get as far as lifting its serverHold status.
posted by flabdablet at 12:23 AM on February 20, 2021 [4 favorites]
By the way, as well as serverHold the kkar.org WHOIS listing also shows clientTransferProhibited, serverDeleteProhibited, serverRenewProhibited, serverTransferProhibited and serverUpdateProhibited status codes. When you get around to taking the advice you got on 10-Feb and jumping ship, allocate a few days for sorting out the grief Network Solutions will surely give you when you try to transfer your domain name to its new registrar.
posted by flabdablet at 6:20 AM on February 20, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by flabdablet at 6:20 AM on February 20, 2021 [1 favorite]
I can’t help you with the technical solution but I can advise you to never, never, never do business with Network Solutions.
posted by rdr at 1:08 PM on February 20, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by rdr at 1:08 PM on February 20, 2021 [3 favorites]
Is there are reason you can't get your money back and transfer the domain and hosting to another site? Network Solutions is one of the worst companies I have ever dealt with. I have been happy overall with Ionos.
posted by wnissen at 1:24 PM on February 20, 2021
posted by wnissen at 1:24 PM on February 20, 2021
Thirding or fourthing or whatever the idea that you should start by putting as much distance between yourself and Network Solutions as you can. Just run. Any heading, so long as you maintain it as best possible speed.
Honestly, I could spend days and megabytes enumerating all the reasons why Network Solutions is fucking terrible. But there's little point in doing anything but repeated the last two words over and over in a wearier, more disgusted tone of voice: Fucking. Terrible.
posted by sourcequench at 5:54 PM on February 20, 2021
Honestly, I could spend days and megabytes enumerating all the reasons why Network Solutions is fucking terrible. But there's little point in doing anything but repeated the last two words over and over in a wearier, more disgusted tone of voice: Fucking. Terrible.
posted by sourcequench at 5:54 PM on February 20, 2021
At the present time it does not appear that there is a delegation from the .org nameservers for the kkar.org domain, which you definitely need to have any hope of success.
(this first command is just to find out which nameservers are responsible for providing authoritative answers for the .org TLD (top level domain.)
Honestly if you are talking to support people and they haven't been able to figure out that much, you are wasting your time because this is a fundamental problem and should be immediately obvious to them. It might not be their fault, but if they're trying to troubleshoot why a domain doesn't seem to be working and they don't look to see if it exists then they are probably not very good troubleshooters..
flabdablet, above, is correct that the worldnic nameservers appear to believe themselves to be authoritative for kkar.org. When we ask those servers specifically who is responsible for answering queries for the kkar.org (i.e. who are the nameservers listed in the NS resource record set for kkar.org) they answer that they are:
posted by Nerd of the North at 3:25 AM on February 22, 2021
(this first command is just to find out which nameservers are responsible for providing authoritative answers for the .org TLD (top level domain.)
~ $ dig org. nsOK.. So let's pick the first listed nameserver from the "ANSWER" section above. Now we are going to ask that server (which should know all of the subdomains of .org) to tell us which nameservers (NS resource record type) are responsible for answering queries about kkar.org:
; <>> DiG 9.16.8 <>> org. ns
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; -xxHEADERxx- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 26731
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 6, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 13
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
; COOKIE: b4091c305cbc9b1618a060e36033905d87de8dfccaec12d3 (good)
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;org. IN NS
;; ANSWER SECTION:
org. 5769 IN NS d0.org.afilias-nst.org.
org. 5769 IN NS c0.org.afilias-nst.info.
org. 5769 IN NS a2.org.afilias-nst.info.
org. 5769 IN NS a0.org.afilias-nst.info.
org. 5769 IN NS b2.org.afilias-nst.org.
org. 5769 IN NS b0.org.afilias-nst.org.
;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
a0.org.afilias-nst.info. 52913 IN A 199.19.56.1
a2.org.afilias-nst.info. 48858 IN A 199.249.112.1
b0.org.afilias-nst.org. 52913 IN A 199.19.54.1
b2.org.afilias-nst.org. 52913 IN A 199.249.120.1
c0.org.afilias-nst.info. 52913 IN A 199.19.53.1
d0.org.afilias-nst.org. 52013 IN A 199.19.57.1
a0.org.afilias-nst.info. 52913 IN AAAA 2001:500:e::1
a2.org.afilias-nst.info. 48859 IN AAAA 2001:500:40::1
b0.org.afilias-nst.org. 52913 IN AAAA 2001:500:c::1
b2.org.afilias-nst.org. 52913 IN AAAA 2001:500:48::1
c0.org.afilias-nst.info. 52913 IN AAAA 2001:500:b::1
d0.org.afilias-nst.org. 52013 IN AAAA 2001:500:f::1
;; Query time: 9 msec
;; SERVER: 149.20.64.127#53(149.20.64.127)
;; WHEN: Mon Feb 22 11:07:09 UTC 2021
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 462
~ $ dig @d0.org.afilias-nst.org. kkar.org nsThe status code received here, NXDOMAIN, means "no such domain", meaning the master nameservers for the .org TLD are not aware that there should be a kkar.org subdomain of that TLD.
; <>> DiG 9.16.8 <>> @d0.org.afilias-nst.org. kkar.org ns
; (2 servers found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; -xxHEADERxx- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 65100
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;kkar.org. IN NS
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
org. 900 IN SOA a0.org.afilias-nst.info. noc.afilias-nst.info. 2014262751 1800 900 604800 86400
;; Query time: 28 msec
;; SERVER: 2001:500:f::1#53(2001:500:f::1)
;; WHEN: Mon Feb 22 11:07:35 UTC 2021
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 100
Honestly if you are talking to support people and they haven't been able to figure out that much, you are wasting your time because this is a fundamental problem and should be immediately obvious to them. It might not be their fault, but if they're trying to troubleshoot why a domain doesn't seem to be working and they don't look to see if it exists then they are probably not very good troubleshooters..
flabdablet, above, is correct that the worldnic nameservers appear to believe themselves to be authoritative for kkar.org. When we ask those servers specifically who is responsible for answering queries for the kkar.org (i.e. who are the nameservers listed in the NS resource record set for kkar.org) they answer that they are:
~ $ dig @ns95.worldnic.com kkar.org nsThe problem is that no general internet client will ever think to ask those worldnic servers because the delegation at the .org level is missing.
; <>> DiG 9.16.8 <>> @ns95.worldnic.com kkar.org ns
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; -xxHEADERxx- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 17255
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 2800
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;kkar.org. IN NS
;; ANSWER SECTION:
kkar.org. 7200 IN NS ns95.worldnic.com.
kkar.org. 7200 IN NS ns96.worldnic.com.
;; Query time: 99 msec
;; SERVER: 207.204.40.148#53(207.204.40.148)
;; WHEN: Mon Feb 22 11:18:52 UTC 2021
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 87
posted by Nerd of the North at 3:25 AM on February 22, 2021
Can somebody tell me why? And is this an easy fix or not? I mean, is it something I can do, since it seems to be beyond them.It's not something you can fix. Your registrar (the organization who took money from you in exchange for registering the domain name) is supposed to have provided Afilias (the organization that administers .org) information about the nameservers that will anwer queries for your domain so that clients that don't know who your nameservers are can find them by asking the .org servers who they should talk to next (this is what I meant in the previous response by a "delegation" from .org)
Nobody has done that, as evidenced by the NXDOMAIN response returned by Afilias' .org nameservers in response to an NS record query for your domain's name.
Talk to your registrar and tell them that .org gives NXDOMAIN for the domain name they were supposed to register for you.
posted by Nerd of the North at 3:29 AM on February 22, 2021
Response by poster: Is there any way to know how many other people are affected by this?
posted by CollectiveMind at 1:14 PM on February 22, 2021
posted by CollectiveMind at 1:14 PM on February 22, 2021
> Is there any way to know how many other people are affected by this?
Affected by what part?
If you're asking if we can tell how many other domains are similarly misconfigured -- no, that's not an easy thing to find out.
If you're asking how many people are unable to use your site the way its DNS records are currently set up, the answer to that is "everyone that is not using the worldnic nameservers as their default resolver for DNS queries" which will be pretty much everyone in the world (except for a small rounding error.)
To greatly oversimplify how DNS is supposed to work, imagine a client that wants to talk to a network resource that it has never talked to before. It has no pre-existing knowledge of where to find that resource, it only knows how to ask a question of a local nameserver that will get an answer for it. This local client, then, talks to what we call a "recursive" server, meaning that if it does not already have the answer for your query it will go out and find it for you, starting from the little bit that it does know.
If you were the first person to come along and ask such a server a question, and it had not already cached answers from other queries that people had previously asked, it would go something like this:
posted by Nerd of the North at 4:24 PM on February 22, 2021 [2 favorites]
Affected by what part?
If you're asking if we can tell how many other domains are similarly misconfigured -- no, that's not an easy thing to find out.
If you're asking how many people are unable to use your site the way its DNS records are currently set up, the answer to that is "everyone that is not using the worldnic nameservers as their default resolver for DNS queries" which will be pretty much everyone in the world (except for a small rounding error.)
To greatly oversimplify how DNS is supposed to work, imagine a client that wants to talk to a network resource that it has never talked to before. It has no pre-existing knowledge of where to find that resource, it only knows how to ask a question of a local nameserver that will get an answer for it. This local client, then, talks to what we call a "recursive" server, meaning that if it does not already have the answer for your query it will go out and find it for you, starting from the little bit that it does know.
If you were the first person to come along and ask such a server a question, and it had not already cached answers from other queries that people had previously asked, it would go something like this:
Client: can you tell me the address for www.kkar.org?This is the part that is not working because in fact the .org nameservers do not (or did not when I last checked) have a delegation saying who are the nameservers responsible for answering queries about www.kkar.org. Instead they are answering the recursive resolver performing the query with: "Hey, dude, I'm the official nameserver for .org and I have never heard of kkar.org. Here's an NXDOMAIN, you're done, and tell the querying client that there was no record of what they searched for."
Recursive Resolver: I don't know the answer so I will go out and look. I'll start at the top (root) level of the Domain Name Service, aka "."
Hey, root nameservers that anwer for ".", can you tell me how to get to www.kkar.org?
Root nameserver: No, I don't provide answers for that name, but I do have a delegation in my records saying that these nameservers over here answer for queries under .org, here is a referral to them.
Recursive Resolver: I still don't know the answer for www.kkar.org, I had better try again now that I know a little more.
Hey, nameservers that answer for .org, can you tell me how to get to www.kkar.org?
.org nameserver: Under ordinary circumstances should say:No, I don't provide answers for that name, but I do have a delegation in my records saying those nameservers over there answer queries for kkar.org. (and in a similar fashion you would continue walking down the tree until you got to the record you wanted..)
posted by Nerd of the North at 4:24 PM on February 22, 2021 [2 favorites]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by mbrubeck at 8:41 PM on February 19, 2021