[Penguicon-Concom] Penguicon Website and the outage that almost everyone saw.

[Ron Blanchett]

Everybody,

This is an update to bring erveryone into the loop in what happened
over the last couple of days regarding the Penguicon Website.

On 12/30/2007, I moved the last of our services off of our old
webhost, this only effected the website (read webpages) and did not
cause the outage we seen.

On 12/31/2007, I made some changes to our DNS records on our DNS
server. We host our own DNS now. These changes did not propagate
properly to the backup DNS provider that we use and the backup DNS
provider temporarily suspended our Secondard DNS service. This
normally would not have caused a problem but did because I only listed
the Two Secondary DNS servers in our Domain record with our domain
registrar.

On 1/2/2008, Our DNS records that had been updated in all of the
worlds DNS servers expired causing what appeared as an outage of
Penguicon.org. This outage was rectified as soon as I realized that
our Secondary DNS provider suspended pulling updates from our DNS
server and marked our DNS record as bad thus stopping all DNS queries
through their servers.

Still on1/2/2008, I fixed the errors with our Secondary DNS provider
and added several more Secondary Providers (all free (yes we are
getting what we paid for)). I also added all of the other secondary
providers to our domain record and I am working on adding our DNS
server to the listing also. As soon as I can figure our the cryptic
error message they keep giving me it will be added.

Last night, Penguicon.org was back online and all services where
restored. An outage of this magnitude should be avoidable in the
future. Questions, comments, and concerns can and should be directed
to me.

-Ron
Penguicon Webmaster