Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Hitting the Big Red Button

When not tying women up in corsets I do website development. It has its ups and downs. Last month I caught someone trying to hack a clients website. It wasn't a clever attack. But it puts you into full on combat mode. It gets you going 900 miles an hour. Because things happen very quickly online. A lot of damage can be done in a very short time and it can take a LONG time to fix it.

An hour ago I sat down to check my email and noticed that godaddy said I changed a domain name server for a client. I've been offline all day. Alarm bells start going off. No other domain names seem to have been touched, but that might just mean that someone is right in the middle of fucking with my life and the livelihood of my clients.

I fire up my godaddy admin. If they made a change, they might have my password. Change it. I bring up an online chat with my webhosts. Do they know who this new nameserver is? Have they changed hosting providers? No. That's bad. That leaves the client making changes but he doesn't have access. Is he pissed off? Did he contact godaddy directly? I fire up Outlook and get ready to bite the bullet. Once I contact him and let him know there's a problem, it will likely make him nervous. I look like a moron and at best he looses confidence in me.

Then I take a closer look at the email. The domain name is CLOSE but isn't exact. It's the plural version of my clients site. I check godaddy. I never registered that name. A quick whois check shows someone I don't know and he got the name years ago.

I sit back and think. Then I close the email I was going to write to the client. Godaddy fucked up. This email was supposed to go to someone else. How did that happen? Isn't this process automated? I call godaddy just to double check and they have me forward them the email. They say everything is fine.

There is no crisis. No one is messing with anything. I take my hand off the Big Red Button and take a deep breath. Technology. Ain't is grand?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Is that the "Easy" red button or the "Nuclear" red button. I recommend the former. John F. Kennedy had his had on the other red button in 1963 and it almost made for a bad day...not to mention the last day. Besides, imagine what that would do to corset sales. There would be no more flesh to fill in those beautiful lines. Hang in there.

Sir Constantine.