Support from a not quite free service

I realized a ways back that I needed a third party to provide secondary DNS services for my domain and researched many optins and eventually settled on EveryDNS.com. I liked the robustness of the service and the price, free! Of course, they asked for donations and I was happy to provide one for their valuable service.

EveryDNS(ED) has since been acquired by DynDNS(DD) and my needs have changed and I switched to using ED/DD as my primary DNS host. This has worked flawlessly except for one domain. It appears that I ran into a bug with their system and they are not providing accurate DNS results. This is a problem and brings the question.

ED/DD provide technical support, but the response email states that it could take 4-6 days to respond. I can understand slow response on a free service, but I did pay for the service. To make matters worse, the issue at hand is clearly a bug in their system. At this point, I am frustrated waiting for them to respond and my website is having difficulties. Given that I paid, I think that I deserve a better response. Am I being unreasonable with this request?

One final note, my name registrar provides DNS services and so I moved the domain to them temporarily while ED/ED resolves the issue. This solves my problem, but does not resolve my my annoyance.

5/10/10 Update: The DynDNS Twitter team responded to my tweet on this topic.  They were helpful and highly responsive and resolved the problem on the same day!  Kudos to the DynDNS Twitter crew.

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4 thoughts on “Support from a not quite free service”

  1. What issue did you have?

    I alerted them about a bug last week and it still doesn’t seem to be fixed.

    This bug is about DNS SRV records.

    They mixed up the ports and the priority. See below:

    freeswitch@when:~$ dig _sip._udp.tollfreetollfree.com SRV

    ; <> DiG 9.5.1-P3 <> _sip._udp.tollfreetollfree.com SRV
    ;; global options: printcmd
    ;; Got answer:
    ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 33737
    ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

    ;; QUESTION SECTION:
    ;_sip._udp.tollfreetollfree.com. IN SRV

    ;; ANSWER SECTION:
    _sip._udp.tollfreetollfree.com. 38400 IN SRV 20 0 5060 sometimes.sip-happens.com.
    _sip._udp.tollfreetollfree.com. 38400 IN SRV 10 0 5060 when.sip-happens.com.

    ;; Query time: 118 msec
    ;; SERVER: 208.67.222.222#53(208.67.222.222)
    ;; WHEN: Wed May 12 14:34:49 2010
    ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 133

    freeswitch@when:~$ dig _sip._udp.tollfreetollfree.com SRV @ns1.everydns.net

    ; <> DiG 9.5.1-P3 <> _sip._udp.tollfreetollfree.com SRV @ns1.everydns.net
    ;; global options: printcmd
    ;; Got answer:
    ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 23333
    ;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 0
    ;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

    ;; QUESTION SECTION:
    ;_sip._udp.tollfreetollfree.com. IN SRV

    ;; ANSWER SECTION:
    _sip._udp.tollfreetollfree.com. 38400 IN SRV 0 5060 10 when.sip-happens.com.
    _sip._udp.tollfreetollfree.com. 38400 IN SRV 0 5060 20 sometimes.sip-happens.com.

    ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
    tollfreetollfree.com. 38400 IN NS ns1.zonomi.com.
    tollfreetollfree.com. 38400 IN NS ns2.zonomi.com.

    ;; Query time: 103 msec
    ;; SERVER: 208.76.61.100#53(208.76.61.100)
    ;; WHEN: Wed May 12 14:35:01 2010
    ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 176

    1. Thank you for the comment. The issue occurred when I converted my domain from being a secondary to a primary. When the conversion occurred, ED did not remove the old secondary records and so DNS queries were reporting both the outdated secondary records and the updated primary records. It was an exercise in frustration and required manual intervention from the support team to resolve.

  2. It caused a major outtage for me, and I had to switch to a new DNS host. All of my users were attempting to connect to port 10 and 20 instead of port 5060 like they should have.

    1. Now that is a major bummer. What a disappointment! The good news is that my needs are simple and so I temporarily switched DNS providers until the issue was resolved.

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