Yea, I think you stumbled upon the reason MS is easier to learn. You can do less with it. Linux is a swiss army knife and then some.

It is like everyone around here is too young to remember the last what 3-6 failures MS made at "new" search engine or too old and their memory does not work anymore.

There is no reason to waist time and effort on bing as webmaster, until bing (or whatever they want to relabel it) starts moving traffic I don't care about bing as a search engine.

I live and work in Chile, and know the network problems well here. Here is my take on it.

I seen that nic.cl had several of their DNS servers that where failing about three weeks ago (I just figured someone would figure it out and fix it, guess not ). Any .cl using nic.cl as their primary dns server ( what most .cl domains use by default rather than having their own), was having failures based on which of the dns servers at nic.cl they were using (I think two of them where failing).

Here is what I seen happening. I have a U.S. server, that hosts certain .cl web sites. They all use my own dns servers including backups dns servers spread around the world rather than Chile's dns server. I also have most ISP in China blocked at a firewall level for spam and security reasons (I have no use for talking to China in my biz). Other companies with .cl domains could not send mail to .cl domains on my server, because they where failing in the reverse lookup. That got me checking their DNS server, which happened to be nic.cl directly.

Now there is only about three ISPs in Chile. Yea, there are many by different names, but they all contract or are owned by three companies with the same hardware. Basically there is VTR cable company, Telefonica, and Telmex. Almost all others that I am aware of are the same company under a diffrent name, or they buy their upstream services from them. They all seem to share lines internationally.

The unnamed service provider in this case is most likly telmexchile.cl as they are the host for nic.cl ( a guess, based on other DNS problems I have seen over the years in Chile ).

DNS issues are very common in Chile with all the isps. About 2 months ago, telefonica mis-configured their dns servers and somewhere around 60% of all internet users, including mobile phone users (telefonica is known as movistar cell phone company) lost the ability to connect to much of the rest of the World. Telefonica is the upstream provider for many smaller ISP in Chile, and at times contracts through telmex also.

I have to run my own caching name servers for my offices in Chile, and never depend on the isp here for DNS servers because they are notorious for having caches that are more than 48 hours out of date, not to mention a lookup of domain can add as much as 5-10 seconds to a connection over just trying to get to the other side of the World to reach a foreign server. Especially for stuff that they do not have cached regularly. This has also personally led me to not trust the quality of what they are returning.

So, there is about 90% probability that the ISP in question is either telmex in Chile or Telefonica. The other is VTR cable, and as far as I know they had nothing to do with it because they don't normally do corporate type hosting. 98% of all internet is provided by those three sources according to a recent OECD report (not even sure what the other 2% is they are refering to in the report. Perhaps satellite).

So, the market inbreeding has turned Chile's internet in to a very unstable and fragil set of networks in the last few years, that is essentially unregulated. For instance, during the recent earthquake, even the web site for the national police in Chile got knocked offline for over a week along with most other goverment servers.

So I do not blaim this on China so much (beyond normal things), but on the poor quality of the network administrators and the even lower quality management at the ISP. Mostly I blame this on the former government, for not regulating the ISP and instead encouraging the monopolies that have developed. This was made evident to the country when all the cell phone networks in the country failed for days after the earthquake because they failed to do things like have battery backups for the cell phone towers. I expect some serious changes are on the way.

Chile is not Haiti. It is not even California. The building codes are law, and they are enforced. However, there is something to the natural selection thing, but not the way you mean.

Thousands of buildings went through the 8.8 earthquake with little more than a few cracked windows. It looks like total building collapse amounts to 1 building that litterally fell over on its side, and about 100 or so others that failed by design. The ones that failed on a wide scale where 200+ year old adobe houses (mostly one and two story structures). Those adobe structures did survive to some degree because they had never taken a full earthquake. The big ones had always been north or south of the 7th and 8th regions that got hit the hardest by this quake.

The death however was not really caused by the earthquake, but by the tsunami waves that came 3 hours apart. The navy screwed up by lifting the alert too soon, and people started returning to the beach.

My office building (15 floors), took an 8.0 about 200 miles from the epicenter. We lost a couple glass doors when the metal frame flexed, a few cracks, and one broken water pipe on a floor. It was built about 10 years ago.

No one even gets up and leaves the building anymore for anything under a 6.0 around here.

Public traded company. under ticker symbol LNUX, and you do not need to be a non-profit anything to have a .org .

Yea, you can. Your FIRED!!!

For us in the disaster zone (I am in Temuco 100 miles south of the worst hit areas), it feels like 48 hour days. They likly will just get longer as this goes on.

if you want to help, visit http://www.allchile.net/

I operate allchile.net, a forum for expats in Chile that has been operating for a little over 4 years. I am located in Temuco, Chile (about 100 miles south of the worst devastation) and just got my internet connection back a few hours to see all the spammers on google trying to force their way in to the position. Now me and all the other established sites in Chile, with real history and connections to know what is going on in Chile are fighting the Google spammers to try and get people in touch with their missing relatives and get news out to the World about the distaster.

If you have a web site, and want to help us, link to the real sites about Chile. Even Facebook, twitter, and CNN are in a way in our way. They will be all chatting up the topic for a week or two more, then they will be gone. Our sites will still have to fight back up to the top of Google while trying to assist with the reconstruction.

My sites and my friends sites (all run by people on the ground in the disaster by the way):
http://www.allchile.net/
http://www.allsouthernchile.com/
http://www.santiagoradio.cl/
http://www.thepulse.cl/
http://www.spencerglobal.com/

Totally agree. There are plenty of affordable backup dns services like dnsmadeeasy.com, that will give you global dns backup coverage for very little money and still allow you to maintain ns6.mydomain.com type servers.

I don't think a lot of people with just a couple sites realize that if you can keep dns up, even really cheap hosting going up and down will keep those outages from doing real damage such as with mail not arriving. servers will keep trying normally for a long time as long as the DNS resolves. That is aside from being able to reach your host to be able to work on it in an emergency.

A lot of cheap hosting packages provide dns servers in their reseller package, but not many people really appreciate what a bad idea it is to have your only dns server on the same machine.

nmap seems to think they are running Sun Solaris. You can not tell me there is not at least one open source application on that service with that list of ports.

PORT STATE SERVICE
20/tcp closed ftp-data
21/tcp open ftp
25/tcp open smtp
80/tcp open http
110/tcp open pop3
113/tcp closed auth
143/tcp open imap
443/tcp open https
587/tcp open submission
636/tcp open ldapssl
993/tcp open imaps
995/tcp open pop3s
50000/tcp closed iiimsf
50002/tcp closed iiimsf

As someone that has been around the block with running a lot of web sites (well, a couple thousand at least) for say the last 10 years, I have learned the hard way to not put all your eggs in one basket. Registries come and go, even the big boys (at least service comes and goes, policies change), hosting providers can go bad for all kinds of reasons, and your DNS services are your keys to the castle in terms of just how much damage an outage can do to a buisness (backup DNS severs people).

RULES OF IT:

1. The boss is always right.

2. IF the boss is wrong (and they normally are), see rule one above.

Lets lobby governments all over the world to make it a tax credit.

Yea, I wish we could get mother nature to stop that evolution crap. It is a well proven failed model for building quality systems.

a big fat EMP over the enemy sure would be cool however. Just hope that enemy is not next door to your house.