Watching the ongoing collapse of the old .us domain
Around 3pm today, pell.portland.or.us all of a sudden stopped resolving. This was not a particularly good thing to see, given that that’s the primary address for my mail and web, so I took a brief look at the dns.
It turns out that the upstream domain (not host; the portland.or.us domain) appears to have been abandoned. There are three nameserver that serve the portland.or.us domain, and two of them are dead (NS.ALTERNATIVE.NET & THERMAL.IES.LAFAYETTE.IN.us) while the other one (RAIN.PSG.COM) doesn’t respond to any requests inside the portland.or.us domain (at all; the other one I tested was the now-abandoned (because it’s TOO HARD to type periods) ci.portland.or.us that used to point to the city until about 10 months ago.)
pell.portland.or.us still works, of course. As does tsfr.org. Neither of which I actually USE as anything except for redirects because I live in portland.or.us.
Which is now dead.
(roll eyes)
At least the pell.portland.or.us domain is still functional. Think of the poor scammers who wouldn’t be able to send me mail if it wasn’t.
UPDATE: And it’s 7pm, and the domain is silently back in existance on two of the three domain servers (RAIN.PSG.COM, NS.ALTERNATIVE.NET.) I suspect that ns.alternative.net is the primary for the domain these days, and when it falls over dead for a week or so the entire PORTLAND.OR.US domain just silently evaporates the way domains on pell do when I forget to manually update the zones on my nsd-driven secondary NS.