TRANSFERRING NAME SERVICE FROM A2I TO ELSEWHERE

When transferring name service for a domain from a2i to another organization, please keep the following hints in mind.

Your new service provider will make arrangements to take over name service and file the necessary name server change request with the InterNIC. You may also do this yourself, after getting the necessary name server information from your new service provider.

The InterNIC will send a confirmation request to the old administrative and technical contacts. If such a confirmation request comes to us, WE WILL SEND BACK A REPLY ONLY IF YOU, THE A2I CUSTOMER, HAVE EXPLICITLY REQUESTED THIS FROM US. We have encountered many instances of third parties attempting to "hijack" domains by filing unauthorized change requests. To avoid problems, it's our policy that we do not send back an acknowledgement to a domain change request unless this has been explicitly requested by one of our customers.

If you want us to send back the reply, please do the following:

Get the ticket id that the InterNIC assigns to your request. This is normally in the automatic message that the InterNIC sends back.
Send to support@rahul.net an email message and say, "please send an ack for this request, ticket id = xxx for domain yyy". (Fill in the ticket id in place of xxx and your domain name in place of yyy."

If for some reason you are unable to give us the InterNIC's ticket-id, we will still attempt to honor your request; but due to the large volume of DNS and other changes that we process, we are more likely to misplace your request.

After your domain's name service has been transferred, wait about 10 days, and then send email to support@rahul.net and say "Please delete this domain <name> from your name servers. Name service has been transferred to <name of new ISP>." We will verify that the new name service is valid, and we will then delete your domain from our name servers. If you want us to unconditionally delete your domain from our name servers without checking for new valid name service, please specify this.

Your first email request to support@rahul.net establishes an a2i ticket-id. Please preserve this in all subsequent correspondence. This keeps all email in one place and allows us to more efficiently respond to your request. This is easily done, if you always use your mail software's 'reply' command, which will automatically preserve the subject heading in email, along with the ticket id.

POSSIBLE PROBLEMS

Here are some problems that are sometimes encountered, and how you can prevent them.

If the contact information listed for your domain by the 'whois' command is invalid, the confirmation request sent by the InterNIC may not reach anybody. The name server change request may then not get processed. Therefore, *before* you ask your new service provider to request a name server change, please make sure the contact information is valid.
Please be sure to send us the ticket-id assigned by the InterNIC when you ask us to send the reply to the InterNIC's request. This will help us accurately handle your request.
Wait about 10 days after transfer of name service before asking us to delete your domain from our machines. We will delete it whenever you make the request. If you make the deletion request too soon, the domain will be deleted from our machines before the updated name server information propagates to all sites on the Internet. This may cause loss of incoming email and other problems. Once we have deleted the domain, if you change your mind and ask us to add it back, it will be treated as a new domain registration request, incurring the usual charges.
If you never ask us to delete your domain, we will eventually delete it when we scan through our name server files looking for stale entries. This could be some weeks or months later. During this time mail originating from our machines might not propertly reach you, because it will rely on old information in our configuration files. Therefore you should be sure to ask us, about 10 days after the switch is completed to your satisfaction, to delete your domain from our machines.
InterNIC problems occur quite often. Email to or from the InterNIC has been known to get lost. Once your request has been sent to the InterNIC and been acknowledged, wait about 5 days for the request to be completed. Then, if it seems that something went wrong, be sure to check back with us so we can then look to see whether or not we received any request from the InterNIC.
Domain name service at a2i is provided by geographically separate name servers in Washington (Seattle) and California (San Jose). This provides significant protection in case of problems at any one of these locations, such as a power outage or earthquake. We highly recommend that you make sure that your new service provider runs at least two independent name servers at locations distant from one another. Most of the nationwide service providers (UUNET, MCI, Sprintlink) use such geographically independent name servers, and so does a2i.

You may optionally keep name service for your domain at a2i and simply have us point the appropriate records (A records, MX records, CNAME records, etc.) towards your new service provider. We can continue name service for your domain for $60/year if you have no account with us.

$Id: domain.take.how,v 1.6 1999/05/12 21:54:14 rdroot Exp $
$Source: /files/home/ftp/pub/guest/www/howto/RCS/domain.take.how,v $