Yes, you read that correctly. On June 12th, 2012 the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) will be taking the entire .CA registry offline to perform a “middleware upgrade” which is scheduled to run 24 hours.
Why they are doing this in the middle of the week during peak hours is unknown.
Why they have to take the entire registry offline for 24 hours is unknown.
What benefits will be derived from doing this are unknown (but apparently it has something to do with forcing all registrars to nearly rewrite most of their XML code to ignore the way XML is actually supposed to work and to generally consume as much development bandwidth as possible across all registrars).
What This Means:
During the scheduled outage of the .CA registry
- You will NOT be able to change your nameserver delegations
- You will NOT be able to modify your whois contact info, in fact…
- You will NOT be able to do any whois lookups on any .CA domains
- You will NOT be able to register a new .CA name
- You will NOT be able to transfer a .CA domain between registrars
- You will NOT be able to RENEW a .CA name.
What You Should Do
If you have any .CA’s which renew on the 11th, 12th or 13th then you should renew those domains now.
If you were planning on modifying any registry aspect of your .CA’s like nameserver delegations, do that before the 11th.
Watch this space for a forthcoming opinion piece on why Industry Canada should be opening operation of the .CA root to competitive bidding every 5 years.
That is all.
Thanks, Mark, for your post about our upcoming .CA registry service outage. For information about what transactions are affected by the service outage and the reasons for the outage, please visit read our .CA Registry Upgrade FAQs: http://cira.ca/news/announcements/ca-registry-upgrade/
The most astonishing thing of all is that CIRA has buried this important “Maintenance window” and it is not front in ‘Center’ when visiting http://cira.ca/
The top news releases is:
CIRA announces 2012 .CA Impact Award winners at mesh conference
Great job CIRA…
Lautaro
LOL!
I’ve read the .CA “FAQ” (which seems to be an announcement, not an FAQ list) and it really doesn’t answer very many of Mark’s questions.
The vague statement about staying ahead of threats simply tells me that CIRA doesn’t have anyone who understands security, or at the very least whoever wrote that “FAQ” didn’t have access to any such person.
There a a vast number of legitimate technical reasons to upgrade middleware (and what middleware does CIRA use? why?) but “staying ahead of threats” isn’t one of them. “Upgrading to a platform that will be fully supported and patched for the next five years” is a valid reason for an upgrade, and naturally leaves unsaid “…which the current system is not”.
Oh, well – we’ll probably never know.
-Adam
Five years strikes me as perhaps a bit too frequently, but it definitely is an idea that deserves exploration. I look forward to reading your opinion on the matter!
@Adam – Upgrading to a new platform, less than two years after moving to the new one. We saw the same excuses used to justify the last set of upgrades. “24 hours of outage” is becoming the new norm, just like a school shutting down for July and August to sweep the floors.
It will be interesting to watch how CIRA competes with the thousands of new TLDs ICANN is bringing online…