Heri does Ruby on Rails + Web Design

3 days ago, I had a call from SP, who wants to open a youth hostel.

Now, i have to say the story began a while ago. She is renovating and re-arranging her appartment, and has called me for web services. It turned out that _Tourisme Québec_ wanted her website address so that they could list her in the upcoming 2007 guide. SP called me a few months ago and we purchased the domain “ChezFanny”:http://chezfanny.ca . I said to her that we need to plan out the website. Oh well, she is _very busy_ and would call me back. Anyway, 3 days ago, she phones me and wants to publish the website in one hour. _Tourisme Québec_ found out there was nothing. I remembered quickly that the domain name was still at netfirms.

What could I do? Tell her that it needs from 24 to 72 hours to propagate the DNS to the madmedia servers ? Of course, she talked as if it works by pushing a button.

Let’s try it, I said to myself. I fired up RapidWeaver so that we could have a dummy page, redirected chezfanny.ca to the ns4.nocdirect.com…

I got then a note form JaguarPC saying that they changed their policy and asked their customers to get their own DNS servers. I had 6 websites with them and that meant they wont be serviced anymore.

The final blow arrived when JS phoned me, and said that “his cinema chornicles”:http://leschoixdejohnny.com showed instead the not-so-politically-correct “yamiyama”:http://yamiyama.com (a pet project of mine) . He was convinced it was a planned joke and requested that I bring back the website. The problem was that the website was running perfectly, from my point of view.

I have to ask you, the reader, what do you, when customers are at your gate, with pitchforks and asking for your head, and at the same time, you see your long-trusted supplier running away with your daily tools?

Well, I guess you have to work hard and get things done. We now have our own DNS servers, hosted at “madmedia”:http://madmedia.ca .SP didnt get her website on in under one hour. There is no miracle here, but we now have a live, although bland, website. JS turned out to be the biggest problems. This was a new problem for me. I went downtown at public libraries and checked out “leschoixdejohnny”:http://leschoixdejohnny.com After multiple phone calls, frantic arguments, i found out the problem was that www.leschoixdejohnny.com was redirecting to yamiyama.com . Weird, isn’it ? I was convinced it was a DNS problem, tweaked the TTL setting. nothing. nada. blank.

What happened? It was just a problem with Apache. The conf file had to include ServerAlias www.domain.com

Everything is all right now I guess. Oh well, I still have to wait for netfirms to get their DNS web forms working. They told me I would get an answer friday morning. I guess people have different definitions of a 24/7 service and customer support.