I was caught in a spoffy situation over the last couple of days. I have been happily using Joker.com as my domain registrar for a long time. Last year sometime I decided to stop maintaining my own DNS servers for all the sites and moved the DNS information to Joker's free service (if you have your domains registered there, they provide DNS service). Well, I now know what happens when your DNS provider is hit by a DDOS attack and your DNS provider happens to also be your registrar. You can't easily switch to a new DNS provider while your registrar is under attack. Most of my sites went down yesterday afternoon. I managed to squeak in to the Joker.com website using a machine at MIT that still "remembered" the DNS information for Joker's web server. In that small window of time, I got eogeo.org switched over to EveryDNS. (By the way, EveryDNS is run by some good people, and it's free. But I decided to send them another donation since they were there when I needed them.) Later on that evening I was also able to take care of random-stuff.org and intl-interfaces.com as well as some other sites I help manage.

Today I realized that GeoRSS.org is still affected. Raj owns that domain, so I wasn't able to do anything about it. I think it's somewhat accessible because one of the Joker nameservers is still working. If you're have trouble accessing GeoRSS.org, please be patient.

So, I've learned something. Letting your registrar handle your DNS is spoffy.

[thanks to Jo Walsh for teaching me this great word!]