Gandi.net Major Outage | Hacker News Reader

Gandi.net Major Outage

status.gandi.net

53 pointsDonckele31 comments

There is no good outage. But, it is great to see that when their portal/admin/webmail is down, DNS, SMTP, IMAP/POP3, SSL, Network is not affected by this.

Some of it seems to be down. I use Gandi for my DNS, I can still access my site at www.example.com but the redirection I have from example.com to www.example.com doesn't work.

That's... Weird. How are you accomplishing a redirect with just DNS? I always thought you needed some sort of web server for that.

CNAME?

CNAME is aliasing, not redirecting. If www.$domain.com is CNAME for $domain.com, loading www.$domain.com will make you remain on www.$domain.com, not redirect you.

Maybe that is what the issue is? Some, well many, DNS providers provide value add transparent additional features like redirect and email. If their web infrastructure is down then that might not work even though the core DNS shit does.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking too, so the original point of edvinasbartkus still stands, because actual networking is not affected, only hosting.

> How are you accomplishing a redirect with just DNS?

Perhaps it's an HTTP-based redirect, and that's why it's down whereas DNS is up?

That would make sense, but then tym0's reply to edvinasbartkus doesn't make any sense. It would be like saying: "It seems that DNS is not affected, only hosting." and the reply being: "Yeah, but it seems that hosting is affected as well"

That's my bad, I understood edvinasbartkus's "portal/admin/webmail" as not including things like webservers & redirects.

Web redirects are usually not called web hosting in the dns industry, even if it technically operate just like any website. It is more like an attached service for a customers dns.

It is similar how the web interface for email has technically nothing to do with the email infrastructure and email protocols, but as a service it is packaged together with email.

It's not DNS alone. In the Gandi UI you can set up a so called "web redirect" which results in an A record pointing to one of their http servers that does the actual 301 redirecting. If that http server is down, the redirect won't work.

Yes it was badly phrased from my part, I should have said: "My DNS record for www.example.com works but the web redirection I have from example.com to www.example.com doesn't work."

Kudos for a status page that actually works during an outage. And a nice granular display of what's down, and what's not. There are very large companies that haven't been able to do this :)

what's gandi.net?

domain registrar, email host, VPS provider, etc. all on the front page

they’re hands down the best domain registrar on the interwebs. been using them for years.

I use them for some of my domains but the fact that they do not have standard dynamic DNS management is pitiful.

I had to write something to interface with their API - it works but I could have used the OOTB solution in my router.

Their API is first class to be fair, I have a tiny dynamic DNS script in a cronjob

Yes, this is a very good API (the previous one was very bad, the current one is great).

This does not change the fact that dyndns kind of updates is standard and they should support it to make their customer's life easier (and avoid coding an intermediate something to handle the changes). I wrote a webservice that translates dyndns requests into Gandi API calls but I would very much prefer avoiding to maintain that.

I don't know where you're running your scripts on, but https://github.com/brianpcurran/gandi-automatic-dns worked well for me when I had a DynDNS scenario going a while back. So that might be worth a look if you want to reduce the amount of code you have to maintain yourself. I still maintain the AUR package for it FWIW.

They used to be and reasonably priced. But not so much anymore. Domain prices have risen significantly IMO.

As long as you never have a problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001822

Why do you think so? They're expensive and have some unnecessarily intrusive policies.

So, sorry to hijack the thread, but if I want to buy a domain name for my saas, which domain registar would you recommend?

I value:

- whois privacy

- minimal downtime (:p)

- full featured (I don't actually know what I need from a domain registrar, but I don't want to find out after months of usage that I need some feature that my domain registrar doesn't support)

I've had a great experience with porkbun after being recommended them on HN. I've never had to open their website or think about them since I bought the domain, which is exactly what I want in a registrar.

I think that whois privacy is required by ICANN for .com or something like that. I mean that every or almost every registrar provides that. So if your only requirement is minimal downtime, I'd choose something like Cloudflare.

I've been using Name.com for more than a decade and have had zero issues.

We were using them for DNS hosting as well as a registrar. About 6 or so years ago suddenly all of our sites went down.

A quick look showed their nameservers were returning completely incorrect records for all of our domains (e.g., the A record for each domain resolved to a bunch of different IPs that were not ours and seemed to be other customers').

They had no status page to indicate there was/wasn't any issues. I contacted support and they said it was resolved but wouldn't tell us what or why it happened.

When we started transferring domains out, sales contacted us and asked what was going on. They had no idea what we were talking about when I explained what happened. I asked them if they could provide any more information, or if the company would be publishing an incident report. They contacted some tech teams and said all they could tell us was that it was fixed and wouldn't happen again.

The issue itself wasn't so much of concern as the complete lack of transparency or communication.

No idea if things have gotten better since because there are about a zillion options for registrars and DNS hosting so I've had no reason to go back.

Personally I've utilized Gandi for a long time, I'm wrapping up a complex corporate domain portfolio migration to them and they've done amazingly well.

If you're just using for registrar, I would absolutely use them with no reservations.

My main advice is: Be wary of choosing large and/or cheap registrars.

Big registrars can’t afford any support costs since they prefer to squeeze the price down as far as possible, and therefore they prefer to simply lose or outright drop any customer in case of any and all problems. Conversely, small registrars may charge more, but have better (i.e. actually existing, and sometimes even dedicated and personal) support for when things go wrong, and have a vested interest in keeping you as a customer.

A small registrar might also be so small as to know you personally, which will help monumentally against any social engineering attacks.

(I work at a rather small registrar, with lots of small clients, including lots of private individuals, but also some very big customers; i.e. company names you might recognize. We aren’t cheap, but our support is worth it to our customers.)

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