It’s 2014, why are domains so hard?

Last year I moved to Ireland and as of last December, I closed the VAT ID that made me a self-employed consultant. The reason why it took me a while to close the ID was that I still had a few contracts going on, which I needed to have expire before. One of the side effect of closing the ID is also that I had/have to deal with all the accounts where said ID was used, including the OVH account where almost all of my domains, and one of my servers, were registered — notably, xine-project.org has been registered forever at a different provider, Register4less of UserFriendly fame.

For most accounts, removing a VAT ID is easy: you update your billing information and tell them that you no longer have a VAT ID. In some rare cases, you have to forgo the account, so you just change the email address to a different one, and register a new account. In the case of OVH, things are more interesting. Especially so if you want to actually be honest.

In this case, I wanted to move my domains out of my account, in Italy, with a VAT ID, to an account in Ireland, without said ID — one of the reasons is that the address used for registration is visible in most whois output, and while I don’t care for my address being public, the address is now my mother’s only, and it bothered me having it visible there. That was a mistake (from one point of view, and a godsend from another).

First problem is that you cannot change either your account or your VAT ID status out of an OVH account, which meant I needed to transfer the domains and server to a different account. There was (and possibly is, I don’t want to go look for it) some documentation on how to transfer resources across contacts (i.e. OVH accounts), but when I tried to follow it, the website gave me just a big “Error” page, unfortunately “Error” was the whole content of the page.

Contacted for help, OVH Italia suggested using their MoM management software to handle the transition. I tried, and the results have been just as bad, but at least it did error out with an explanation, about trying to cross countries with the transfer. I then contacted OVH Ireland as well as OVH Italia, with the former, after a long discussion where they suggested me to do … exactly what I did, “assured me” that the procedure works correctly — only for OVH Italia apologizing a couple of days later that indeed a month earlier they changed the procedures because of some contractual differences between countries. They suggested using the “external transfer” – going through your standard transfer procedure for domains – but it turns out their system fails when you try that, as the domain is already in their database, so they suggest using the “internal transfer” instead (which as I said does not work).

Since a couple of my domains were going to expire soon, this past weekend I decided to start moving them out of OVH, given that the two branches couldn’t decide how to handle my case. The result is that I started loading the domains onto Gandi — among the reasons, the VideoLan people and one of my colleague know them pretty well and suggested them warmly. This proved trickier, but it also provide one thing: not all French companies are equal!

I started by moving my .eu, .es and .info domains (I own among others automake.info, which redirects to my Autotools Mythbuster — the reason is that if you type the name of the info manuals on G+, it actually brings you there! I was actually planning to make them actually point to a copy of the respective info manuals, but I’ve not studied the GFDL enough yet to know whether I can). While the .info domains are still in limbo right now, as OVH has a five-days timeout before you transfer out, and the .es domains were transferred almost immediately (the Spanish NIC is extremely efficient in that regard, they basically just send you an email to confirm you want to change the registry, and if you accept, that’s it!), the .eu were a bit of a pain.

Turns out that EURid wants a full address to assign the domain to, including a postcode; unfortunately Ireland has no postcode, at the time of writing and even the usual ways to represent my area of Dublin (4, 0004, D4, etc) failed; even the “classical” 123456 that is used by many Irish failed. After complaining on Twitter, a very dedicated Gandi employee, Emerick, checked it out and found that the valid value, according to EURid (but not to Gandi’s own frontend app, ironically) is “Dublin 4”. He fixed that for me on their backend, and the .eu registration went through; this blog is now proudly served by Gandi and that makes it completely IPv6 compatible.

But the trial was not completed yet. One of the reasons why I wanted to move to Gandi now, was that Register4Less was requiring me sort-of-transfer the domain from Tucows (where they resold it before) to their new dedicated registry, to keep the privacy options on. The reason for that being that Tucows started charging more, and they would have had to charge me the extra if I wanted to keep it. On the other hand, they offered to transfer it, extend the expiration another year and keep the privacy option on. I did not like the option because I just had renewed the domain the past November for a bunch of years, so I did not want to extend it even further already — and if I had to, I would at that point try to reduce the number of services I need to keep my eyes on. Besides, unlike Register4Less and OVH, Gandi supports auto-renewal of domains, which is a good thing.

Unfortunately, for ICANN or whoever else manages the .org decided that “Dublin 4” is not a valid postal code, so I had to drop it again off the account, to be able to transfer xine-project.org. Fun, isn’t it? Interestingly both the .org and .it administrators handle the lack of a post code properly — the former as N/A and the latter as the direct translation N.D.. Gandi has been warned, they will probably handle it sometime soon. In the mean time it seems like the .eu domains are not available to Irish residents, as long as they don’t want to fake an address somewhere else.

And the cherries on top, now that I’m migrating everything to Gandi? Their frontend webapp is much better at handling multiple identically-configured domains, to begin with. And as they shown already their support is terrific especially when compared to the mirror-climbing of their other French competitors. But most importantly, have you read a couple of weeks ago, the story of @N? How an attacker got a hold of GoDaddy and caused trouble for the owner of the @N twitter account? Well, turns out that Gandi people are much more security conscious than GoDaddy (okay that was easy) and not only they provide an option to disable the “reset password by email” option, but also provide 2FA through HOTP, which means it’s compatible with Google Authenticator (as well as a bunch of other software).

End of story? I’m perfectly happy to finally having a good provider for my domains, one that is safe and secure and that I can trust. And I owe Emerick a drink next time I stop by Paris! Thanks Gandi, thanks Emerick!