Purism Domain Puri.sm Suspended? | Hacker News Reader

Purism Domain Puri.sm Suspended?

whois.marcaria.com

63 pointsqxotk47 comments

Oh I bet the registrar didn't pay the annual fee and that .sm suspended the domain as a result.

Context, this would be the third time I've heard of this, I was the second time I heard of this happening to .sm domains and it was via Gandi screwing it up. The first was actually Purism.

https://puri.sm/posts/the-great-purism-dns-outage-of-2018/

https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/386644/

Everyone wants a cute domain but there are good reasons to go with .com or with your country's national domain extension.

Is the problem here with the TLD or the domain registrar?

Probably both. lesser TLDs probably don't have the volume and money to support more automated and less error prone systems

True, I wanted to register crowdstrike.sucks only to realize it’s owned by some PR firm crowd strike keeps on retainer.

They missed https://clownstrike.lol, though.

That entire TLD was a racket

I think the cute names are more reliable than many of the small countries. In this case, .sm is a country TLD. I would bet .sucks and .rocks are better funded.

And here's that first link in archive form, because puri.sm is suspended: https://web.archive.org/web/20240521012506/https://puri.sm/p...

TLDR: Last time this happened, it was that their registrar forgot to pay the San Marino (.sm) registry.

Hilariously, their registrar's "sm specialist" was in California - but the San Marino registry's office hours are from midnight California time to 9am California Time, so the registry's "sm specialist" was incapable of contacting the registry :D

The blog post talks about DNS glue records, but are they really relevant to the issue if the domain is suspended? A suspended domain is a suspended domain, regardless of whether it's using vanity nameservers.

https://purismspc.com (the backup domain they registered after the 2018 outage) is sort of working. It responds, but links all go to puri.sm so they don't work, stylesheets don't load, etc.

The PureOS site <https://pureos.net/> is still up, which makes upgrades etc. unaffected, thankfully.

Nothing yet on their X: <https://x.com/puri_sm>

This is why you don't use ccTLD's for your business.

Or rather, why you don't use ccTLDs of other countries for your business. Using your own country's ccTLD is perfectly fine, and has an advantage over a gTLD of not being potentially subject to the whims of a foreign country.

not if you live in a country with an unstable or corrupt gov't

In that case you’re at risk no matter what you do.

More information has been posted to the forum: <https://forums.puri.sm/t/puri-sm-domain-was-suspended/24475/...>

e-mail service provided by purism (librem.one) also appears to be down :(

I have to say though apart from the occasional blip, service has been pretty steadfast for the last ~5 years.

The nameservers registered for librem.one are ns1.puri.sm through to ns3.puri.sm, so yeah, even if that domain is technically fine it'll be down because of this.

yes, doesn't respond.

  Domain Name: puri.sm
  Registration date: 05/05/2014
  Status: Suspended

  Owner:
  Purism SPC

...

  DNS Servers:
  ns1.puri.sm
  ns2.puri.sm
  ns3.puri.sm

hmm... and DNS servers are in the domain

That isn't outrageous however I totally understand why it rubs you the wrong way.

I was also baffled by that aspect of DNS before. During my first internship, my mentor who was impressed with my knowledge in general asked me if I had anything to ask. I told him there is something that doesn't make any sense to me at all about DNS. I asked him exactly that situation, and we talked about glue records and it all clicked. I think you could also bootstrap with things in the cache if you're careful since it is a distributed system.

https://www.ibm.com/blog/understanding-glue-records-and-dedi...

I think they were talking about the “Status: Suspended” part more than the NS records.

Check the last line with "hmmm".

I swear that wasn’t there when I replied!

(I’m sure it actually was and I just missed it.)

I was also wondering about the NS records.

Lots of other domains generally have nameservers that are outside the domain, or at least a mix of in/outside the domain. In this case it looks like it could be a best practice to do this.

While having nameservers in multiple TLD:s is a good idea, it does not help against a domain being suspended outright.

What was the tool used to generate this output?

That looks like whois, available on most Unix versions.

...and it's back

https://puri.sm/

I suppose this is a case of where filling in the text field when you pressed submit would have helped.

What is a Purism and why should I care?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purism_(company)

Purism is a company in California that sells Linux computers and other privacy-focused devices and services. Their Librem 5 phone is probably the most famous product they've had; it was originally crowdfunded and had a lot of delays with production and delivery, but on the other hand, it resulted in a lot of contributions to the GNOME project (specifically the current GTK and Adwaita combo, which has incorporated a lot from Purism's libhandy project).

Purism also had/has this AweSIM cellular plan offering. Shortly after I signed up (a couple years ago), their backbone provider went bankrupt or dropped them or something; don’t remember. The outage lasted months, and during that whole time they kept charging the monthly fees! I sent a pointed message to support and they said “oh, well we promise we were always planning on refunding these charges later.” They offered to refund me individually because I’d called them out.

Thanks. I know about the Librem phone actually. Had no idea how the company making it is named though.

Well seeing how hackernews is a tech site we kinda expect you to know tech.

Count me as another person who had (had) no idea what this company is. They have 32 employees and < 10M revenue.

They kind of punch above their weight in terms of name recognition and development influence within the desktop Linux ecosystem. I currently work at System76, and we're kind of the same way; anyone following the /r/Linux subreddit or reading OMG! Ubuntu for more than a month probably knows of us, even though we're not actually that large.

But if you don't use Linux or don't actively follow desktop Linux development, then it would be quite easy to have no clue.

> But if you don't use Linux or don't actively follow desktop Linux development, then it would be quite easy to have no clue.

I don't, and that's probably why.

It's not the size. They have (had?) one well known product but the fanbois expect everyone to know how the company is called, what US state it's registered in and the CEOs shoe size...

> I currently work at System76, and we're kind of the same way; anyone following the /r/Linux subreddit or reading OMG! Ubuntu for more than a month probably knows of us

Funny, in this case I know of your company name but have no idea if your products have names and what they are.

famous for linux desktops with wood-grain paneling, if memory serves! (and it maybe doesn't!)

Purism is mostly known for its laptop and smartphone products. You might be thinking of System76 Thelio.

Yeah, that's why I said "of us," lol. We have our fingers in a lot of pies, also similar to Purism (but not a 100% overlap, and with some differences in philosophy).

My point wasn't that everyone should know Purism already, just explaining why it seems completely obvious to those of us in that niche. I really think it's a legitimate feeling of "they're in the news all the time" and forgetting that not everyone is exposed to the same news, rather than just a "fanboy" thing. For some people, they're right up there with Red Hat and Canonical in terms of presence.

Okay, but as a person reading a tech forum, it is assumed knowing how to look something up on the internet is something that is known. Unless you're just so fundamentally afraid of rabbit holes that you just don't use the web like that.

> we kinda expect you to know tech.

Technology is a vast field, you can't expect everyone "in tech" to know all corners of "tech". This one is well-known if you're looking for alternatives to the current smartphone duopoly, but if that's not your technology niche, there's a good chance that it didn't enter your radar.