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lohphat
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2017-03-10 01:02:42

Dear Rosetta@Home participants,

We -- like many of you who have contacted us -- have been extremely frustrated by the long project downtime. We (bakerlab.org) had a domain name registration verification lapse, and our registrar (dotster.com) and ICANN turned off DNS for bakerlab.org. We went through the steps to getting it verified again Monday afternoon. What should have been a quick procedure is now stretching into 4 days. We apologize for the mass emailing which we have tried to keep to a minimum throughout the course of the project, but this is an extraordinary situation and we have no other way of reaching all of you now.

Since being down we estimate that we have lost a total of around 3.1 million computing hours and continue to lose around 540 computing hours per minute.

We greatly appreciate your help and contributions! With your help, we have been making rapid progress in our research which has been attracting considerable attention, for example:

NOVA:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/origami-revolution.html (the 8 minute segment on our work starts at 20:30)

The Economist:
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21716603-only-quarter-known-protein-structures-are-human-how-determine-proteins

The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/unravelling-lifes-origami/513638

Geekwire:
http://www.geekwire.com/2017/big-data-rosetta-protein-puzzles
which is titled "Big data (and volunteers) help scientists solve hundreds of protein puzzles"

Thank you very much for your continued contributions to and support of Rosetta@Home!

David Baker
Sid Celery
BAM!ID: 85904
Joined: 2010-06-01
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2017-03-10 02:32:18

lohphat wrote:
Dear Rosetta@Home participants,

We -- like many of you who have contacted us -- have been extremely frustrated by the long project downtime. We (bakerlab.org) had a domain name registration verification lapse, and our registrar (dotster.com) and ICANN turned off DNS for bakerlab.org. We went through the steps to getting it verified again Monday afternoon. What should have been a quick procedure is now stretching into 4 days. We apologize for the mass emailing which we have tried to keep to a minimum throughout the course of the project, but this is an extraordinary situation and we have no other way of reaching all of you now.

Since being down we estimate that we have lost a total of around 3.1 million computing hours and continue to lose around 540 computing hours per minute.

We greatly appreciate your help and contributions! With your help, we have been making rapid progress in our research which has been attracting considerable attention, for example:

NOVA:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/origami-revolution.html (the 8 minute segment on our work starts at 20:30)

The Economist:
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21716603-only-quarter-known-protein-structures-are-human-how-determine-proteins

The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/unravelling-lifes-origami/513638

Geekwire:
http://www.geekwire.com/2017/big-data-rosetta-protein-puzzles
which is titled "Big data (and volunteers) help scientists solve hundreds of protein puzzles"

Thank you very much for your continued contributions to and support of Rosetta@Home!

David Baker

Just got the same email. And from a link kindly provided elsewhere here, Keith Laidig has posted further information

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=10279&postid=76320#76320

~~~~
Hello from Rosetta@home - here's the scoop:
the subdomain, bakerlab.org, has been locked by Dostser/ICANN since Monday. We missed ICANN's WhoIs Registry update request (OK we're lame, but the request looked just like so much spam!) and dotster.com locked things down. OK, not good but the verification/update process is an automated email send/request. BUT since our contact email address is "@mail.bakerlab.org" and the MX records had vanished from DNS we couldn't make this work.

They are now trying to 'verify' that we who we say we are; we've sent photocopies of our IT staff's driver's licenses, copies of the University's legal status, letters from our research sponsors explaining who we are and who they are, blah, blah, blah. Now we're in some blackhole of bureaucratic bulls**t and we can't get ICANN to respond to our enquiries.

So, rather than rant on and on about all of this, I'm merely going to say that the group is scrambling to get this straightened out. We're going to start a Tweet-storm at @ICANN, @ICANNOmbudsman, @Dotster and whomever else might be able to get things rolling. If you can suggest something to help us along, tweet to the group @rosettaathome.

We are so sorry for our part in screwing things up but we're frickin' furious that this has become a 4+day outage... -KEL
~~~~

Holy moly...
lohphat
BAM!ID: 201174
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2017-03-10 12:24:30

There are at least THREE operational errors bakerlab.org made:

1. Missing the domain renewal email.
2. Not hosting their own domain DNS with an external provider to prevent DNS attacks and improve resiliency. Many registrars offer the service.
3. Don't use admin contact email addresses which are from the same domain to prevent communication lockout. Use an obfuscated email (to prevent spammers address scraping) or at the very least, use a common provider like @gmail.com
lohphat
BAM!ID: 201174
Joined: 2016-02-11
Posts: 16
Credits: 791,238,215
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2017-03-10 15:51:43

lohphat wrote:

There are at least THREE operational errors bakerlab.org made:

1. Missing the domain renewal email.
2. Not hosting their own domain DNS with an external provider to prevent DNS attacks and improve resiliency. Many registrars offer the service.
3. Don't use admin contact email addresses which are from the same domain to prevent communication lockout. Use an obfuscated email (to prevent spammers address scraping) or at the very least, use a common provider like @gmail.com



Correction, from the UW admin:

The missed email was not a renewal mail. the domain is paid through 2020 since 2015, but a security verification email.
lohphat
BAM!ID: 201174
Joined: 2016-02-11
Posts: 16
Credits: 791,238,215
World-rank: 2,482

2017-03-10 15:53:17

UPDATE from the UW admin:

The DNS issue has been fixed, it will now simply be a TTL timeout of cached DNS failures for the domain to resolve again.
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