This is a post that relates to one of my dayjobs, and has nothing to do with Free Software, yet it is technical. If you’re not interested in non-Free Software related posts, you’re suggested to skip this altogether. If you still care about technical matters, read on!
Do you remember that customer of mine that almost never pays me in time, for which I work basically free of charge, and yet gives me huge headaches from time to time with requests that make little to no sense? Okay you probably remember by now, or you simply don’t care.
Two years or so ago, that customer calls me up one morning asking me to register a couple of second-level domains in as many TLDs as I thought it made sense to, so that they could set up a new web-end to the business. Said project still hasn’t delivered, mostly because the original estimate I sent the customer was considered unreasonably expensive, and taking “too much time” — like they haven’t spent about the same already, and my nine months estimate sounds positively short when you compare it with the over two years gestation the project is lingering on. At any rate, this is of no importance to what I want to focus on here.
Since that day, one set of domains was left to expire as it wasn’t as catchy as it sounded at first, and only the second set was kept registered. I have been paid for the registration of course, while the domains have been left parked for the time being (no they decided not to forward them to the main domain of the business where the address, email and phone number are).
The other day I was trying to find a way to recover a bit more money out of this customer and, incidentally, this blog, and I decided to register to AdSense again, this time with my VAT ID as I have to declare eventual profits coming from that venue. One of the nice features of AdSense allows to “monetize” (gosh how much I hate that word!) parked domains. Since these are by all means parked domains, I gave it a chance.
Four are the domains parked this way: .net, .com, .eu and .it. All registered with OVH – which incidentally has fixed its IPv6 troubles – and up to now all pointing to a blackhole redirect. How do you assign a parked domain to Google’s AdSense service? Well, it’s actually easy: you just have to point the nameservers for the domain to the four provided by Google, and you’re set. On three out of four of the TLDs I had to deal with.
After setting it up on Friday, as of Monday, Google still wouldn’t verify the .it domain; OVH was showing the task alternatively as “processing” and “completed” depending on whether I looked at the NS settings (they knew they had a request to change them) or at the task’s status page (as it’ll be apparent in a moment, it was indeed cloesd). I called them — reason I like OVH: I can get somebody on the phone to eat least listen to me.
What happens? Well, looks like Registro.it – already NIC-IT, the Italian Registration Authority – is once again quite strict in what it accepts. It was just two years ago that they stopped requiring you to fax an agreement to actually be able to register a .it domain, and as of last year you still had to do the same when transferring the domain. Luckily they stopped requiring both, and this year I was able to transfer a domain in the matter of a week or so. But what about this time?
Well, it turns out that the NIC validates the new nameservers when you want to change them, to make sure that the new servers list the domain, and configure it properly. This is common procedure, and both the OVH staff and me were aware of this. What we weren’t aware of (OVH staffers had no clue about this either, they had to call NIC-IT to see what the trouble was, they weren’t informed properly either) is the method they do that: using dig +ANY.
Okay, it’s nothing surprising actually, dig +ANY is the standard way to check for a domain’s zone at a name server… but turns out that ns1.googleghs.com and its brothers – the nameservers you need to point a domain to, for use with AdSense – do not support said queries, making them invalid in the eyes of NIC-IT. Ain’t that lovely? The OVH staffer I spoke with said they’ll inform NIC-IT about the situation, but they don’t count on them changing their ways and … I actually have to say that I can’t blame them. Indeed I don’t see the reason why Google’s DNS might ignore ANY queries.
For my part, I told them that I would try to open a support request with Google to see if they intend to rectify the situation. The issue here is that, as much as I spent trying to find that out, I can’t seem to find a place where to open a ticket for the Google AdSense staff to read. I tried tweeting to their account, but it seems like it didn’t make much sense.
Luckily there is an alternative when you can’t simply set up the domain to point to Google’s DNS, and that is to create a custom zone, which is what I’ve done now. It’s not much of a problem, but it’s still bothersome that one of Google’s most prominent services is incompatible with a first-world Registration Authority such as NIC-IT.
Oh well.
