[PCWorld]

Post your comments for GoDaddy says its Servers are Ready for Time Switch here

[pissedatgodaddy]

Well, I have several websites hosted with GoDaddy and they are currently down. This is being written at 3:03 PM EST on Sunday, March 11, 2007, the day of the change. I googled "st. louis places to see" and checked George Baltzell's site and it was down as well. When browsed through a browsing proxy, they show up, though butchered in some way. Check out stlplaces.com, Baltzell's site for updates on whether it's back up or not. Looks like GoDaddy really dropped the ball on this one and I'm really getting sick of the stupid quirks with them. Looks like people may start looking elsewhere... I sure will.P.S. Looks like stlplaces.com is back up, but mines isn't, and I know that not revealing my site reduces the credibility of this post but hey, check your own and see. They even have "3/11/2007 - We are currently experiencing technical difficulties." posted on their Support Forum site at https://www.godaddy....7009&tab=3Check it our for yourself...

[georgeb]

Hi, George here.When the story went to press GoDaddy had still not patched the server I run on. It's one of their Linux boxes. However by Saturday morning they had and everything looked fine. Even early this morning my site seemed fine. And I never expected more than some times to be displayed wrong. Thought that could be confusing to the user. I'd hadn't bothered to check a friends site (doesn't display the time anywhere) that runs on a Windows box so I don't know about that. Then later I found that my other domain names that redirect to my main site were going nowhere! The rest is your guess is as good as mine. The only thing, that may mean nothing, is my main site became accessible again before my friend's on the Windows server.The outage of GoDaddy and Yahoo! Mail were both noted in SANS' Internet Storm Watch.

[Jesse]

It was an IT nightmare for everyone, and every company. Not a good reason to switch services in my opinion. A great reason to switch planets. I suggest Saturn.

[compumom]

That George expected the people that trouble shoot minor software issues to be able to assist him with a Developer question is what strikes me as alarming. Why would ANYONE ask an online support tech from ANY company what they wouldn't know under normal circumstances? The common sense on this is obviously lacking.

[georgeb]

Developer question? No, an underlying OS question. In Linux, as in most modern operating systems, the time is kept in UTC (aka GMT). However, people like to see time in their local timezone. An OS call is provided to make this common function simple. Internally a table provides for when political changes that affect when daylight-saving time takes place. Each user of the system simply sets their own timezone in their environment in a variable called TZ simply telling the OS what the display timezone is and it's offset from UTC. For me that code is CST6CDT. In Arizona and not on a reservation the code would be MST7. Once set all human displays of date and time follow the rules that apply. What was apparent from my test was that GoDaddy had not updated the table in the OS to include the new start and end of daylight-saving time. What was apparent from the email exchange was that they had no clue as to how this worked and were not interested in providing a reasonable answer. Yet the day after the article appeared they had fixed it!I have no idea if the crash was in anyway related to DST. I appeared at first as if their domain name servers were not properly resolving redirected names. The names I have that went directly to a server were still working for quite a while. I have a feeling (and no proof) that this denial of service (DoS) story may be a misunderstanding by their PR dept. of the abbreviation DNS (domain name server).

[compumom]

Evidently, you seem to think that just because it says "online support" that it will be someone with any knowledge of what the developers within the company are or are not doing..wake up. Online support and phone support personel are not highly paid programmers, they are normally whoever applies for the job. And I am not so computer inept as to need your explination. :rolleyes:

[georgeb]

Then you should know that if it's not something they can handle they should pass it along to someone that can.