eNom Hosted Custom Domains Again Showing Intermittent Connectivity Issues

This week, we have a few reports in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, about active and mature domains, suddenly stopped working.

I have used my domain with no problems, since last year. Today, it suddenly stopped working, and the browser reports

Oops! Google Chrome could not find www.mydomain.com.

I asked my friends about my domain - and they tell me that my blog is inaccessible to them, also. I didn't change any settings - and it was fine, until last night.

As we reported last year, the Google partner registrar eNom occasionally has a problem with their DNS server complement. Right now, one of their DNS servers appears consistently bad.

Using a comprehensive Dig tool, we can observe a given domain, and compare the DNS addresses being served by all authoritative name servers for a given domain, in a single transaction.

Here's a hypothetical example, of what we're seeing right now, for several eNom hosted domains.

mycustomdomain.com@dns1.name-services.com.:

mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN A 216.239.36.21
mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN A 216.239.34.21
mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN A 216.239.38.21
mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN A 216.239.32.21

mycustomdomain.com@dns2.name-services.com.:

mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN A 216.239.36.21
mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN A 216.239.34.21
mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN A 216.239.32.21
mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN A 216.239.38.21

mycustomdomain.com@dns3.name-services.com.:

mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN A 216.239.36.21
mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN A 216.239.32.21
mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN A 216.239.34.21
mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN A 216.239.38.21

mycustomdomain.com@dns4.name-services.com.:

mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN A 216.239.36.21
mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN A 216.239.34.21
mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN A 216.239.32.21
mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN A 216.239.38.21

mycustomdomain.com@dns5.name-services.com.:

org.   3601 IN
 SOA dns1.name-services.com. info.name-services.com. 2010 10800 3600 604800 3600


www.mycustomdomain.com@dns1.name-services.com.:

www.mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.

www.mycustomdomain.com@dns2.name-services.com.:

www.mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.

www.mycustomdomain.com@dns3.name-services.com.:

www.mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.

www.mycustomdomain.com@dns4.name-services.com.:

www.mycustomdomain.com.  1800 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.

www.mycustomdomain.com@dns5.name-services.com.:

org.   3601 IN
 SOA dns1.name-services.com. info.name-services.com. 2010 10800 3600 604800 3600

Right now, it appears that server "dns5" is consistently broken.

It's possible that this problem will affect more eNom customers, as the day progresses, cached DNS addresses expire, and readers of various eNom hosted domains request DNS addresses. I hope that eNom Customer Service can react to this problem more promptly than they have reacted to the immediately previous problem.

Watch for eNom acknowledged changes and problems.

• eNom: Maintenance Alerts