FYI sunhelp.org down

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Wed, 14 Oct 2020, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote:

> > I posted to <rescue at sunhelp.org> and saw my message got stuck in the mail
> > queue.
> 
> When did you send your message?  I'm trying to judge when the problem started.

 Last Mon, Oct 12th.  The last message I received from the mailing list 
was on Oct 1st.  WHOIS has this though:

   Domain Name: MRBILL.NET
   Registry Domain ID: 1373333_DOMAIN_NET-VRSN
   Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.namecheap.com
   Registrar URL: http://www.namecheap.com
   Updated Date: 2020-10-11T07:01:46Z
   Creation Date: 1996-10-11T04:00:00Z
   Registry Expiry Date: 2021-10-10T04:00:00Z
   Registrar: NameCheap, Inc.
   Registrar IANA ID: 1068
   Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse at namecheap.com
   Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.6613102107
   Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
   Name Server: DNS101.REGISTRAR-SERVERS.COM
   Name Server: DNS102.REGISTRAR-SERVERS.COM
   DNSSEC: unsigned
   URL of the ICANN Whois Inaccuracy Complaint Form: https://www.icann.org/wicf/

so I take it the original domain went down on Oct 11th at ~7am; OTOH 
sunhelp.org itself has yet two years to go (as you have also observed).

> > I can still reach Bill Bradford's personal page when I connect to the server
> > by its IPv4 address at: <http://184.94.207.190/>.
> 
> Thanks to John's quick thinking, it's now possible to hot wire things so that
> you can get to sunhelp.org, et al.
> 
> The hot wiring that I did seems to have been sufficient to allow email to flow
> to sunhelp.org.  I've since sent a message to a few people inquiring about the
> current state of the ongoing rescue operation.
> 
> The last I knew, some of Bill's co-workers were going to take things over.
> 
> If anyone cares to similarly hot wire things on their end, I configured my
> recursive DNS servers to forward Bill's domains to John K.'s DNS server
> (192.80.49.4).  I also configured my email server to route sunhelp.org
> directly to ohno.mrbill.net.

 I suppose the list server relies on the same nameservers in a way that 
prevents e-mail distribution from happening.  I have since resubmitted the 
same message manually to sunhelp.org's SMTP receiver (the original message 
is still in the outgoing mail queue:

smtp/sunhelp.org:
        B/W/23993316: (196 tries, expires in 2d17h) smtp; 466 (No DNS response for host: sunhelp.org; h_errno=0)

) to see what happens and got a DSN ack even, but the message did not get 
through.  So local hot wiring of name resolution (which I suppose could be 
as easy as adding a /etc/hosts entry rather than going through the hoops 
of setting up a manipulated name server) might be good enough to get at 
the web pages, but not to get the list going.

  Maciej