Might be worth moving up to an honest-to-goodness ADM... there are very reasonable ones for point applications such as these, and they are made for continuous CO operation, unlike the wall-wart powered devices that seem to be so popular. A number of our customers have had some luck with these:
http://www.oasystel.com/Products/Minimux155/Minimux155.htm
Regards,
Andrew Bender
taqua.com
I know this is probably off-topic, but -
How does one modify a host record these days?
The NSI site is utterly unhelpful on the subject, the web page I
bookmarked a few months back no longer works, and the e-mail interface to
hostmaster seems to be no longer supported...
Any pointers highly appreciated!
Grisha
You're right it is off topic, but this particular one has been peeving me
for a while so now seems like a good time to bring it up.
Host records are actually covered under the web interface. Login to an
account and it's the bottom left Quick Link, "Manage Host Servers".
The trickier one is creating a contact record for a role account. You can
only create individual contacts via the web interface, and submitting the
e-mail seems to bounce with "incorrect template version" and a copy of the
correct version for the domain registration. I was able to create one role
contact by submitting the form about 50 times, but haven't been able to
duplicate my success since then.
This incompetence brought to you by Network Solutions.
This assumes that the host record is named under a domain sponsored by NSI, and that it is COM or NET we are talking about. The most general advice for COM and NET is:
1. determine the parent domain of the host
2. determine which registrar is sponsoring the parent domain (whois.crsnic.net)
3. do whatever registrar-specific thing is required to update the host record.
4. wait until the host record appears in the registry (and in the COM or NET zones, if it results in glue records).
5. cheer enthusiastically.
I haven't used NSI for a long time, so I can't comment on your NSI-specific advice. It had a general tone of anger and frustration though, which makes me think it is quite possibly accurate.
The absolutely general advice, for all registries, is:
1. determine whether the registry in question even includes the concept of host objects
2a. if it doesn't, stop and scratch your head, but resist the temptation to post to NANOG
2b. if it does, do something registry-specific.
Joe