Procedures for Moving Domain Name Service (April, 1996)

To provide the best professional service, here is our plan for transition between providers. This plan has two major advantages: first, it ensures that the transition is perfectly smooth with no lost mail, WWW traffic, etc. Second, it minimizes the time we spend on transitioning your domain. For the second reason just as much as the first, this is the only way we will transition domain names and service.

Please note that this plan applies whether you're transitioning a domain name to Opus One or from Opus One; the mechanics are identical. There are three steps that each of the providers has to do to ensure a smooth changeover.

There is some fairly technical detail in this document. If you're a web designer or the end user, don't worry about not understanding it all. Just make sure that both ISPs on both ends of the transition have this document. (However, if you are an ISP and you don't understand this, then you should get out of the Internet business right now)

STEP 1: Freeze domain with correct information

ACTION: Notify the old and new providers that a transfer will take place. It is important that the DNS administrators of both the old and new provider have accurate contact information. The official Opus One contact to give the other provider is Support@Opus1.COM.

If any other information in the domain is incorrect (such as the addressing information for the administrative contact/owner of the domain), this should be fixed before anything else happens.

The old provider will freeze all changes to the domain. It is necessary to make sure that things are stable, because there is a small window where problems can occur if you suddenly need to change things. Inform your old provider that the domain must be frozen. The old provider will have, essentially, made the last change to your domain before changing control. At this point, the old provider usually should drop the TTL & refresh on your domain to a small value (such as 1 hour).

When the new provider receives the zone files from the old provider, they should set themselves up with the authoritative new information for your domain and claim to be an authoritative primary/secondary server.

INSTRUCTIONS TO OLD PROVIDER: Drop TTL and refresh to 3600. Mail the zone files to the new provider.

INSTRUCTIONS TO NEW PROVIDER: Tell old provider what new primary DNS server will be. If Opus One is the new provider, our DNS server is ns2.opus1.com, 192.245.12.52. When you receive zone files, put them in place and make yourself a primary & secondary for the domain.

The situation now is that we have two different providers both claiming to be giving authoritative information for a domain. This is why STEP 1 is so important; it keeps things stable.

STEP 2: Make the InterNIC swing from old to new provider

ACTION: Send a domain change template to the InterNIC changing the DNS servers. When the old provider gets their copy of the request, they should change their servers to be secondary servers to the new provider, using the primary DNS server address from STEP 1.

(Note that we say "InterNIC," but that's only true for the main 3-letter domains (.COM/.ORG/.NET/.EDU). If you are using a different domain, the registrar may be different. You can consult Opus One's list of Internet registrars to see the appropriate registrar for your domain name.)

INSTRUCTIONS TO OLD PROVIDER: Change from primary to secondary on old primary server.

INSTRUCTIONS TO NEW PROVIDER: Assist customer in filling out domain modification template.

At this point in time, the new provider is in complete control of the domain and you may begin to transition electronic mail services, WWW services, etc. at your convenience. You should also TEST that all four name servers (both primaries and secondaries) have identical SOAs. Naturally, none of this can happen until the shorter TTL has propagated, so make sure you allocate enough time.

STEP 3: Shut down old DNS service

ACTION: Old provider removes name from their server. At this time, the old provider may want to wind down any accounts, web servers, etc. which you might have---if you have actually changed service providers. Remember that the party which provides DNS service does not have to provide all the other services. In fact, our experience has been that it is better to make the transitions slightly offset so as to eliminate DNS as a cause of confusion.

Remember that the old provider may have already forgotten all about this transition. You should make sure to remind them about this step.

INSTRUCTIONS TO OLD PROVIDER: Remove all references from both primary and secondary.

If you don't like our transition plan

However, we have learned that folks will not take the time to go around and clean up after themselves if they are transitioning away from Opus One. For that reason, we have two important policies that you should know about. Our goal is to make sure that we are as consistent as possible with the true state of the world.

1. We NAK all un-requested domain name changes

You can keep us from NAKing a change by simply telling us, in email, "please ACK the domain name transfer when it comes in." We will be happy to do this, but only on the instructions of our contact for the domain.

However, we will always NAK a request which transfers name servers away from us but leaves us as the billing contact. This is almost always an error on the part of your new ISP and needs to be fixed sooner or later; better sooner than later. It may happen that somehow you are able to transfer the name servers without changing the billing contact despite out best efforts. In that case, if and when the bill comes to us, we will ignore it---more specifically, we will take no effort to attempt to get it to you. Again, please do not be surprised.

2. We remove your configuration information when we get a transfer request

If you don't like the idea of your domain going off-the-air as soon as we get a transfer request, then we will be happy handle it according to the transfer procedure in this document, which will ensure that there is never an interruption in service.

However, we may or may not know about all the usernames and dialup services which are associated with a domain name, so you should explicitly tell us about them if you don't want to be charged for services.