www….

I woke up today to a frantic email, voicemail, and text message from the committee chair for the BCC.

“The domain is down! Email, the website, everything! HELP!”

Apparently, the domain expired and no one bothered to renew it. Since I’m not the point of contact, I had no direct authority to correct the problem. I’ve bitched about not being in charge of the total domain since the beginning but was content to live w/the limitations.

Actually, I’ve bitched for almost a year now about the committee chair routinely making decisions about the domain w/o consulting me. I’ve also pushed really hard to consolidate a lot of redunancy in the system. Most of my complaints have fallen on deaf ears. After today, I don’t think that will be a problem anymore.

Turns out the domain was still in the name of a person who had left the organization. Luckily, he is still in town and reachable. He provided me w/the necessary information to log-in via the registrar and get the problem resolved. I got to work immediately and had it fixed within a matter of hours. Of course, having a domain expire is mucho bad. It can take days sometimes to get the InterNic index updated. In non-geek terms, there are servers connected to the internet w/the sole purpose of resolving a domain name from words into it’s numeric form. This basically tells the net where to look for the information. It can sometimes take days to get changes into the servers. Luck was again on our side, the domain was back up, albeit sporadically, within just a few more hours.

At the end of the day, everything is back up and running smoothly. I also convinced the chair to purchase the available .com, .net, and .us extensions for the domain as well. That way, in the unlikely event this problem ever happens again, we have other domains to utilize.

Am I good or what?