WARNING: The following will be a slightly technical post that has nothing to do with cigars.
Earlier this week I discovered a glaring flaw in the domain naming service configuration of passionforcigars.com. While the website was working fine, there were issues that were causing several failures on other parts, including (most notably) e-mail.
What is DNS?
DNS is, simply put, the phone book of the Internet. It is what lets you remember PassionforCigars.com instead of 192.0.78.25. As simple a concept as that is, it is a very complex system that needs to be properly configured, lest everything stop working.
What happened?
Earlier today I started working to fix the configuration, and realized there were a number of inconsistencies that needed to be resolved. Making those changes, as I suspected, had the potential to bring all of the services connected to the domain down temporarily. As such, as of this writing, the site is down. A fan discovered the site was down and asked me: “…Why don’t you just call an IT Professional?” I forget that not everyone who reads my cigar articles realizes that I actually am an IT Professional.
Never Fear!
It took a little bit of time, but it should be working now. DNS is a distributed database that exists on thousands of servers around the world, and when a change is made it can happen instantly… or it can take hours for the changes to replicate and start working. Never fear, it will be back up and running, and we can light a stogie to celebrate the functioning DNS!
Sorry for the issues, and stay smokey!
Passion For Cigars 