So there was a nice little charlie foxtrot with the domain I have been using to host this blog on.  Folks have been telling me for about a week now that they were only getting a list of “Related Links” rather than being able to see the normal site, however I was able to log in, view the site and post just fine.  I thought maybe it was an issue with whatever DNS services their ISP was using at the time, until last night.  I went to post a small update about the swap project I am working on and lo & behold, the domain is expired.  This is the second year in a row this particular domain of mine has done this to me.  No e-mails, call or anything.  Just flipped the switch and turned it off.  Although I am not sure why I was able to access it for a little while when the outside world couldn’t.  So I go to Registry Rocket and try to re-new it and for whatever reason their page won’t accept any payment I tried to put through, just ambiguous error messages about not being able to pre-authorize the card.  I became fed up fighting with trying to get them to take my money and give me the domain back so I just registered a new one just for the car, updated the NS and went to bed to let it propagate.

So this morning I tested it out and still no go, couldn’t resolve.  I thought that odd since most times I have had to make NS changed it was a few hours at most before I could resolve the new address.  I didn’t think too much of it since I didn’t have time to mess around with it anyway and headed off to work.  Later in the morning I tried to hit it up and bingo, the test index I stuck in there was showing up.  Tried registry rocket again and they still didn’t want my money.  Not having time to worry about someone being reluctant to take my money I went about the work day and headed home.  Once back here I tried to access the site again and no go.  The irritation started to rise once again and I grabbed the cell and was able to resolve over that network.  So I thought about it for a second and I’ve been using OpenDNS at home for a couple years now and never had an issue with them.  So as  test I went back to the comcast DNS and bam, worked like a charm.  I don’t know why OpenDNS is taking so long to propagate.

So I sit down and after a while of playing around with the database and moving some files around I was able to get the blog itself back up.  I then found a nice little plugin that did all the hard work for me by going through the DB to find and replace all the old links with the new address while keeping the serialization.  Hopefully I won’t have to deal with that again since the new domain registration is under the same place as my hosting now and they are much better with e-mail communications.  I would still like to renew the other domain to at least setup some redirects but I am not going to put too much more effort into it.