/contrib/famzah

Enthusiasm never stops


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ResellerClub technical problems with DNS and Domain Forwarding

Today I woke up and found out that many of my domains aren’t working. I’m using ResellerClub (aka. DirectI) free DNS and free Domain Forwarding. Well, they deleted all my DNS records. The Domain Forwarding service stopped working too.

I’ve filed a support ticket with an “Emergency” priority. Let’s see what happens now… I’ll keep you updated.

UPDATE: Instead of just fixing things, ResellerClub really disappointed me. I am their long-term and very faithful customer, but now I see that I shouldn’t have trusted them so much.

It took two days for ResellerClub’s support to respond with the following ridiculous statement:

DNS records are merely record entries made in the server, and not a space occupying entity for which a ‘backup’ would be available/generated.
Hence there is no backup for the records at our end.

ResellerClub keep no backup whatsoever of their DNS and Domain Forwarding configurations! The explanation of this fact is hilarious — because DNS records do not occupy space. 🙂

This really pissed me off, and I asked them how they could operate without a backup. What if the disks of their DNS or database servers fail? What if an operator deletes a record by mistake? The answer by ResellerClub’s support was that they monitor their servers, so this is not an issue. Ha-ha! Since when is monitoring a substitution of backups?? Furthermore, they added that the system was fully automated, so no operator’s mistake was possible. I replied that even if the system operates automatically, it is still being maintained by humans, who may delete data by mistake. How would they explain why my DNS and forwarding data was lost…

Anyway, no need to dig into this any further. I re-created the DNS records, and also learnt an important lesson — never trust an (IT) organization unless you really know that they operate in a professional way by following all well-established principles in the industry. ResellerClub ain’t one of them!


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Perl API Kit for ResellerClub (DirectI)

ResellerClub offer a SOAP/WSDL API interface, in addition to their Online Control Panel, which lets you automate some of your tasks or integrate it directly with your website.

They claim to support a Perl API Kit, but it doesn’t work out-of-the box for me. Whenever I make an API call, I get the following:

soapenv:Server.userException java.lang.Exception: Body not found.

There is a similar bug report at Web Hosting Talk too.

After a few hours of struggling with SOAP::Lite, reading sources, and some trial and error, I finally was able to make the API work in Perl! 😀

If you want to try my version of their Perl API Kit, you have to execute the following:

wget --no-verbose http://www.famzah.net/download/resellerclub/resellerclub-api.tgz
tar -zxf resellerclub-api.tgz
cd resellerclub-api

vi example.pl # edit your username/password
./example.pl

In order to build my version of the Perl API Kit yourself, click the “show source” link below and execute the commands.

mkdir resellerclub-api
cd resellerclub-api
wget --no-verbose http://www.famzah.net/download/resellerclub/setup.sh
wget --no-verbose http://www.famzah.net/download/resellerclub/example.pl
chmod +x setup.sh example.pl
./setup.sh

vi example.pl # edit your username/password
./example.pl

The scripts use some Debian/Ubuntu specific “apt-get” commands to install the required Perl and system packages, but this can easily be ported to other *nix systems too.