Brit registrar 123-Reg begins 2021 in much the same way it ended 2020 – with DNS issues

Third borksman of the apocalypse 123-Reg has ridden into 2021 with... you guessed it, DNS issues. While Microsoft and Slack suffered their own high-profile wobbles as the first working week of the year got started, 123-Reg's issues appear to have been rumbling since December, biting Register reader, Alan, over the weekend. …

[Korev]

DNS, such a bind...

[Symon]

Nice pun, I dig it!

[Doctor Syntax]

Consistency. That's what ISO9000 prizes.

[Steve 53]

This is not K8s on Istio with Space Thrusters and AI.. It's DNS hosting, stable technology for decades. How do you fuck this up so regularly.

Recommendation for Mythic Beasts for better features and a quiet life at more or less the same price...

[A Non e-mouse]

BIND/DNS itself is stable technology. It's their pretty UI/Frontend that appears to be causing the problems. It probably stores the user's configuration in a database then that DB is exported into a BIND file. I guess the problem is in the DB/Web app. DNS is still working as they probably stopped the DB->BIND exports.

[Majikthise]

Moved our personal domain from 123-reg to Mythic Beasts a couple of years back, then migrated email from Gmail to MB. Ashamed I didn't do this a decade ago.

It costs small amount more, but absolutely worth it for excellent service.

No association with Mythic Beasts other than being a happy and relaxed customer.

[Anonymous Coward]

123-Reg's DNS has never been stable, this is a very regular occurrence over the years, one complete outage lasted 3 or 4 days from memory, 123's response, we don't charge for DNS, it's a free service, thus you get what you pay for.

I could probably dig out the emails for you if I could be bothered.

[gannett]

Yet another DNS fail at 123reg.co.uk

It's technical but Email from private domains at 123reg have been marked as spam senders by SPF fails at Google's Gmail for months now.

The DNS txt lines at 123reg.co.uk are so long and chaotic that they cannot be sent in a single UDP packet. Google declines to get the full TXT/SPF records and thus marks 123reg.co.uk customer domains as spam senders.

$ dig 123reg.co.uk TXT

.....

123reg.co.uk. 3600 IN TXT "v=spf1 include:a.123-reg.co.uk ip4:109.68.39.0/24 ip4:80.237.138.26 ip4:92.51.170.64/27 ip4:68.178.213.0/24 include:trustpilotservice.com include:spf.mandrillapp.com include:spf.protection.outlook.com include:sendgrid.net include:mailcontrol.com include:s" "pf.em.secureserver.net ~all"

notice the broken bit in quotes near the end >>> include:s" "pf.em.secureserver.net ~all" <<< that's the failure point. Customers with own email sending domains have to guess (from a wide selection) which of the outbound 123reg.co.uk email server will be in use. As you know a domain that sends emails out via another has to inherit that domains SPF record.

Yes they have been told/shown/proven this problem and admitted the issue but have failed to correct the problem. Other proper hosting providers do this technical point correctly. Despite promoting hosted domains as suitable for email and web friendly they disappointingly fail to deliver ( or send correctly ).

[Alan J. Wylie]

Re: Yet another DNS fail at 123reg.co.uk

I don't think that quoting is broken, see this ISC document "You may have more than 255 characters of data in a TXT or SPF record, but not more than 255 characters in a single string".

[FILE_ID.DIZ]

Re: Yet another DNS fail at 123reg.co.uk

Correct, there is no problem with their SPF record.

Remember that SPF applies to the 5321.Mailfrom domain, not the 5322.From domain. Check the "Return-Path" header value. That domain is the SPF domain that gets checked.

Both MXToolbox and https://www.kitterman.com/spf/validate.html validate 123reg.co.uk's SPF record... so whatever the problem is, it isn't DNS.

Oh, and I'm quite confident that Google knows to accept DNS responses coming back via TCP. Furthermore, looking at wireshark while executing dig 123reg.co.uk TXT @cns3.secureserver.net, the query and response were served via UDP.

Good Luck!

[Pascal Monett]

Wow. What an impressive record.

Of failure.

At this point I have to ask : how is it that 123-Reg still has customers ?

Is there such a dearth of hosting companies in the UK, or are the others equally as shitty ?

Might want to look abroad for hosting solutions. I'm sure you can find competent ones, and I'm sure most of them will handle the transition for you, including managing the domain name.

[dvd]

Re: Wow. What an impressive record.

They still have customers because they buy over other companies such as Domain Monster.

My domains have been in forced migration for a year now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wow. What an impressive record.

I went to domain monster after a multi day dns outage many years ago, as soon as they took over domain monster (who were cheap and whose systems worked and had great support) I left, been at gandi since although I learnt my lesson and host all my critical DNS myself (hardly hard).