As the "test period" for new domain name registrars officially began, Network Solutions continued to suffer from technical glitches.
Work was completed on the Internic Registration Services database over the weekend. On Monday, however, a problem at Network Solutions prevented some of its customers from making changes to their domain names.
Network Solutions spokesperson Brian O'Shaughnessy tried to downplay the inconvenience. "It runs the gamut from negligible to probably a fair level of nuisance to registrants who are trying to do some changes to their site."
The Internic database generally lists technical, administrative, and billing contacts, called "handles," for domain name owners. A user must use his or her handle to make changes to a site. For example, if a domain administrator wanted to add to the domain a server with a new IP address, he would have to use his handle -- often an email address -- to notify Network Solutions of the change.
Some domain name handles started disappearing over the weekend, and Network Solutions has yet to determine how many domain name holders have been affected.
"Some files just list the administrative and technical contacts and won't list the billing contact," O'Shaughnessy said.
Some customers have complained that none of the contact listings appear for some domains, which was confirmed by searching the Network Solutions database.
O'Shaughnessy insisted that the content of the database was still intact internally at Network Solutions.
But some customers were outraged at another in a long string of failures by Network Solutions.
"The handle is the most important thing in the [registration] database," said Danish Internet lawyer and author Dennis Willardt Zewillis. "It is a point of contact -- so that only administrative or technical contact can change domain names around from server to server."
