Problems at Oracle's DynDNS: Domain registration customers transferred at short notice, nameserver records changed

Customers of Oracle's DynDNS who used the service for domain registration - rather than just dynamic DNS - have suffered a sudden involuntary change of registrar, in some cases redirecting websites to those of different companies. This comes after the enterprise giant sent out notices last month about the transfer of its …

[Pascal Monett]

Verify by email - but MX records modified

Dear Lord that is sooo smart. That just has to be the result of middle management meetings pontificating about what to do without having a clue about what the consequences were.

Somewhere, there is an engineer smirking in his beard, thinking "I told them that wouldn't work, but did they listen ? No. Well they're going to get an earful now".

[Captain Scarlet]

Re: Verify by email - but MX records modified

If I was that engineer I would be legging it now, that person will likely get the blame for not yelling enough.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Verify by email - but MX records modified

Been there, previous employer spent over £1M on a system my team told them simply would never work before they signed up. It didn't work, they tried to blame us, we pointed them to the two year old e-mail trail explaining well in advance that it would be technically impossible to do what they wanted.

At that point management backed down, oddly enough none of them were fired.

[karlkarl]

So if Oracle is discontinuing it, can they not just give ownership to someone else?

Loads of routers feature dyndns services and I am sure it can still be monetised by a company if given the chance.

[Velv]

Oracle may not be able to profit from it, but the very last thing they are going to do is allow anyone else to attempt to make money off it. Welcome to Oracle.

[A.P. Veening]

Oracle may not be able to profit from it, but the very last thing they are Larry Ellison is going to do is allow anyone else to attempt to make money off it. Welcome to Oracle.

FTFY

[teknopaul]

GDPR

I wonder if Oracle is GDPR compliant by handing out my personal data to a third party (not a subsiduary) including all my personal details and credit card info.

With not so much as a by your leave.

Any one know if that was legal?

[fredesmite]

DynDSN service has been dead for years .. what are talking about ?

[elvisimprsntr]

Having survived 2 (voluntary) domain transfers, I know what a PITA it can be. Having learned a lot from the first experience, the second time around was to commingle all services in one place (noip.com) for better pricing (Domain, DDNS, MX, eMail hosting, etc.) and took less that 15 minutes.

Too bad Oracle did not provide much detail, advance notice, and made the announcement at a time when most employees are winding down the year and looking forward to the holidays. Too bad some admins did not have a secondary account verification email on file to protect again some of the scenarios listed.

[Halfmad]

Sounds to me as if they wanted all of the accounts gone before the end of the quarter, so **** customers we need a clear quarter without you lot so we can get on with the firing of staff.

[teknopaul]

noip

Do you still recomend noip? They had issues before being blocked.

I've been planing to move off dyn since Oracle purchased it but dont fancy the palavour.

I seem to now have some services at dyn.com others at name.com

[katrinab]

Re: noip

ovh offers a dynamic ip thing as part of its regular domain package and costs about £8 per year.

[hmv]

Re: noip

Domain registration at name.com and DNS at dyn.com (same boat). I'm planning on moving across to EasyDNS as I already use 'em for other domains. It's not quite as much palaver as you imagine, although there's a certain amount of playing it by ear as each TLD works differently (I've transferred dozens of domains).

BTW: I don't do dynamic DNS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another reason Oracle sucks.

So many reasons never to use anything by Oracle, and here is yet another.

[werdsmith]

Re: Yet another reason Oracle sucks.

As soon as it was confirmed Oracle would be involved, I closed my account and legged it.

Same for Virtualbox, MySQL and I wish I could get right of Java completely.

[dave 81]

Re: Yet another reason Oracle sucks.

Yup. I did the same. Shame that Java is so ubiquitous, but I am sure that Oracle's lawyers are hard at work finding ways to extort for it's use.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Yet another reason Oracle sucks.

I cannot believe that Oracle would extort anybody for the use of Java.

Oracle is a wholesome company dedicated to serving their customer base as best as they are able. They will always go out of their way to do the extra cm (or inch) to ensure that the customer comes away happy and delighted to have chosen Oracle to serve their business.

I am 100% certain that Oracles attempt to copyright the Java API is nothing more than an altruistic attempt to ensure that when the copyrights are fully released, free to all to use, the API is complete and fully documented. What other reason could there be?

All my experiences with Oracle have been delightful with the sales rep going above and beyond to ensure that I pay as little as possible for the pleasure of running Oracle software, because it is a pleasure. High quality software, virtually no patches, secure with high interoperability. Not only that, a willingness to work with all my other database software and enterprise software with no extra costs to me.

What's not to like?

Rob

[A.P. Veening]

Re: Yet another reason Oracle sucks.

Oracle is a wholesome company dedicated to serving their customer base as best as they are able.

Such a shame their best is just a complete failure. For any sentence with both "Oracle" and "able" in it to resemble anything approaching truth, there should be a negative in it. NB: In the previous sentence the negative is provided by the word "negative" itself.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Yet another reason Oracle sucks.

Remember that Oracle is a poor little underdog being ruthlessly extorted by evil corporate empires

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Yet another reason Oracle sucks.

> Oracle is a wholesome company dedicated to serving their customer base as best as they are able.

You forgot to mention Oracle's corporate colour: bright red. Such a powerful choice, reminding us of the blood that we willingly give in our daily dealings with Oracle, lovingly mixed with the sweat and the tears.

[Alistair]

Re: Yet another reason Oracle sucks.

Ahhh HA!

I was wondering where the price jump for SARC came from that was lifting the S&P500 up 1000 points.

[SuperGeek]

Re: Yet another reason Oracle sucks.

HAHAHA! How much did they pay you to say all that???

[BugabooSue]

Re: Yet another reason Oracle sucks.

Another +1.

Had been using the (paid) DynDNS service for over 10 years. As soon as Oracle got involved I closed the account.

Stoopid Larry!

[eldel]

Re: Yet another reason Oracle sucks.

I managed MySQL and Java - but getting rid of VirtualBox is proving somewhat more problematic. Convenient (and I stress that word) way of running ad-hoc VMs on Linux isn't something I found when I last looked. KVM sucks and I'm not about to implement an openstack setup.

What else?

[EDIT] Getting off my sorry ass and checking - it appears that VMWare Workstation now allows Linux as a host - I'll try that out. Of course - this is predicated on VMWare being any better to deal with than Oracle - which isn't something I'd put real money on.

[Nate Amsden]

Re: Yet another reason Oracle sucks.

vmware workstation now allows linux as a host? I'm pretty sure that vmware workstation (before it was called that) ran on linux only originally. I was using pre 1.0 on linux back in '99 at least(maybe earlier I don't recall). And have been running vmware (and workstation after they renamed it) on linux ever since. I even had a "VMware 1.0.2 for linux" CD for a long time, wish I still had it, not sure what happened to it.

I want to say vmware for windows hosts didn't appear until 2.0, but I could be remembering wrong.

just for nostalgia I have kept (almost?) all of my vmware downloads, oldest I have is VMware-2.0.3-799.tar.gz (6MB only!!) from Jan 2001. By contrast vmware workstation v15 for linux is a 511MB download. The build number for v15 is 15018445 vs I assume 799 was the build for 2.0.3. That's pretty insane.

[Rob Willett]

Re: Yet another reason Oracle sucks.

I use VMware Fusion on my Mac, used VMWare on my PC and also run ESXI 6.7 (?) on a server at home.

It's always run Linux on all the VMWare's at leats back to 2003 when I first got it. The licensing around Mac OS X is more severe but thats not the point.

I run ESXi 6.7 on a Z97X with 32GB of RAM and have around 12 Linux hosts including an Open Streetmap Server (and thats a memory hog). Fairly easy to setup but there is a bug in ESXI 6.8 which makes life difficult. However I reported another issue with licensing for the free version and got a US based rep call me to talk me through the issue. This was for the free version and I was in the UK. I was utterly astonished and still am.

So VMWare work well for me. The ESXI servers are great and save me building lots of dedciated servers.

Rob

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Yet another reason Oracle sucks.

AWS

[Snake]

File a claim

I would personally say for the users who paid for yearly registration, as have lost all access and services with no response from Oracle and Name.com, to file a complaint and demand a refund from your payment processor, under "Theft of services".

Accepting payment for, but failing to deliver or removing access to services, is theft - the consistent question is always will customers push this issue or just sit back and take it?

Many years ago I bought a prepaid cell phone (Virgin). I moved the phone number to a different company and asked Virgin to give the prepaid phone a new number, the prepait still had a balance. Virgin willingly gave me a new phone number (reactivation) but initially refused to forward the remaining balance, stating company policy. So I said to them "Ok, that's theft of services as you acknowledge that I have a balance that you are unwilling to honor. Is that what you're saying??"

Virgin changed their mind in a hurry and have me my credit.

Companies will try to get away with anything they can unless customers make them do otherwise.

[Martin M]

Idiots

Completely support the idea of going after the card company if the company you're buying services from has misrepresented and/or not supplied said services - see https://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/advice/can-i-claim-on-my-credit-card-when-something-goes-wrong

But is "theft of services" actually a thing in this context? I've not heard of it, and a brief Google suggests it is a term in use in the US, but applies to cases where someone forceably obtains services without paying for them, not where payment has been taken and service is not provided. Also from a legal perspective theft refers to a crime, but this would - like it or not - presumably be a civil matter under contract law.

It might be easier/more fun to use RICO if you think you can make out the case that Oracle is an organised criminal enterprise :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Idiots

I think "organised" is a hard sell.

[Strahd Ivarius]

Re: Idiots

especially since the proper term would be "organized"

[Simian Surprise]

Re: Idiots

This isn't a .com website.

[localzuk]

Why is Oracle still a company?

I'm struggling to think of any positive thing Oracle have ever done. Every company they take over, they drain of all good will and ruin. Every product they release, they create a labyrinthine mess of licensing to deal with. Why do they have any customers left!?

[A.P. Veening]

Re: Why is Oracle still a company?

Why do they have any customers left!?

Those were/are customers of the companies Oracle took over. Most of them are gone by the time renewal is mentioned, which is why Oracle has to keep on taking over companies, otherwise it would run out of customers.

[Chris Hills]

Re: Why is Oracle still a company?

Oracle is a law firm with a software business on the side.

[A.P. Veening]

Re: Why is Oracle still a company?

And not even a good law firm at that, not really winning many cases.

[WolfFan]

Re: Why is Oracle still a company?

Oracle has done lots of positive things. The biggest is that they manage to make Microsoft look like a properly run company.

[Anonymous Coward]

A man does good business, when he rids himself of a turd^W Oracle product.

[teknopaul]

I did nothing and my domains all stayed up during the transfer.

I now have registration and dns split across the two companies. Other dns services dont do dynamic dns. That is builtin to my router so its hard to swap services.

Some how Oracle managed to pas my credit card details to a third party. Is that even legal?

Honestly, fsck Oracle. When they got involved with dyn it was bound to be the death of the service.

[Anonymous South African Coward]

Some how Oracle managed to pas my credit card details to a third party. Is that even legal?

If you're in the EU, then GDPR their asses.

That is not legal, since you never agreed to it.

But IANAL.

[Lee D]

Another company that, the second Oracle got their hands on it, I moved everything away to a rival.

Honestly, how do they not understand how badly every takeover they've ever performed is to the users of those services/product?

[Kevin McMurtrie]

At least not an EIG registrar

When EIG went on their registrar purchasing spree, they created subdomains pointing to advertising servers. I found out when I couldn't fetch email anymore because my 'mail' subdomain had been stolen for ads.

[fredesmite]

DYN was a shitt-hole

I worked there for a year as a developer and jumped ship before Oracle killed them . The most rude, aholes in the business. Micromanagement, loud mouths, and bullie whose shitte doesn;t stink .. and real cesspool how not to treat employees.

GOOD RIDDANCE