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Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

status.gandi.net

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Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#351

Post by NeedMoreTea »

djmobley wrote: post #78
maximente wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what can you recommend as an alternative?

For domain registrations I use a mix of Namecheap, Cloudflare, GoDaddy and Name.com, and haven’t had issues with any of them. Gandi is the only domain registrar I’ve had an issue with.

I've been burned by both Namecheap and GoDaddy, along with losing a few domains in the infamous registerfly scam in the early or mid 00s. Namecheap may have been simple cock up, rather than systemic pattern of intentionally fucking over every customer. Avoid GoDaddy at all costs.

I consider GoDaddy to be one of the worst companies in existence, as bad as anyone else you can think of, as free of corruption as current ICANN and as fraudulent as registerfly. Clients looking at available domains have found them immediately registered and squatted at {hundreds}% markup. Their incompetence lost me a few domains, and several freelance clients reported similar -- all of whom were paying vastly over the odds for what they were getting. GoDaddy make Gandi look an exemplar of ideal behaviour for behaving as people are reporting in this HN post.

Their previous CEO had domain squatting and a complete lack of personal ethics as sidelines. That's quite apart from their horrific upsells making a simply renewal a 22 page nightmare of deeply dark patterned "no" clicks against atrocious value "offers".

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#352

Post by jiggawatts »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #346
jiggawatts wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The equivalent scenario to recovering from a bulk erasure of all Azure RM resources is this: How long will it take you to recover if someone deleted your switch configs, reset the SAN to factory defaults, wiped you firewall rules, deleted you Active Directory accounts (or equivalent), and then ran a secure erase on every every physical server just to raze everything to the ground and salt the earth? I mean in wall-cl…

I think you're moving the goalposts. Gandi didn't lose all their servers and all the networking hardware and all the storage. They lost what sounds like a single replicated volume. If, y'know, all of their datacenters burned down at once, or an attacker got access and deleted their PaaS account, I think we'd all be a lot more sympathetic

My point is simply that the larger commercial cloud vendors aren't magically immune to bulk data loss, particularly in the face of internal threats.

Consider the current tensions between Iran and the US. If Iran decides to retaliate with cyberattacks, major cloud vendors could suddenly have multiple regions go up in smoke concurrently.

They'll just shrug their shoulders and say that it's the customers' responsibility to protect their own data, and that they're just offering platforms for rent.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#353

Post by Eikon »

austhrow743 wrote: post #350
dylz wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gandi has never been a low cost option, they've always been on the high to extreme higher end of things for individual cost... Especially for random ccTLDs, they're often significantly more expensive than the alternatives. Random selections for domains: .ru is $1-3 most anywhere else, Gandi is $18.

High to extreme higher end would be something like MarkMonitor. Gandi might be better than some of the other low touch, self service domain providers but its definitely still in the same ballpark. $18/year still means they're losing money if they ever need to pick up the phone for you. It's not a price point that works with "higher end".

> High to extreme higher end would be something like MarkMonitor.

Being a registrar is only a side effect of their business though, not really comparable.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#354

Post by namibj »

matthewaveryusa wrote: post #41

Looks like their backups only consisted of in-region backups on systems that were homogeneous. Common pitfall. While technically a 3-node distributed system may provide disaster recovery from one node failing, in practice, an accidental rm -rf from an ansible script targeting all three machines, or a bug in the software that's doing the replication, will leave you without a backup plan. If you're in such a situation,…

What backup strategy are you implying for the case of cockroachdb? Streaming the changefeed (including timestamps) to an external append-only system while slowly and incrementally iterating through all tables using as of system time to reduce impact on active transactions and know how late this shard of a "full backup" can be inserted into the "agumented" changefeed you'd generate by interleaving these shards into the changefeed. For replay you'd use the stream from the oldest shard up to the select min(a) from (select max(timestamp_resolved) as a from changefeeds group by table) newest timestamp you know you have the transactions complete changesets for (the resolved timestamp can be periodically emitted to confirm that no further records in the same feed(/table) could have a transaction timestamp earlier than it, inducing a partial ordering).

You could replay the (combined,sorted,agumented) changefeed in-order, or shard it on the table's primary key to ensure per-key monotonicity when applying the streams in parallel threads/transactions/nodes.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#355

Post by ryanlol »

Operyl wrote: post #225
moralestapia wrote: post #87

Whoops, so long with the "no bullshit" policy. I stopped using them a while ago but for a different reason. I used to use their website to check availability/whois for domains that I was interested in buying. If it was available I didn't buy it at the time but until I finished the website/app whatever I was going to put there, this took me a few months obviously. It happened to me that when I was finally ready the do…

They never had a real "no bullshit" policy. When I had my domains with them, I had been asked to verify my identity 34 times in 12 months. 34 separate fucking times. Because "ICANN says so" or some stupid shit (their words, not mine). It stopped the moment I moved to Google Domains, where they asked once and never again. EDIT: And, to make things worse, each time I was threatened with the "confiscation" of my domain,…

Gandi was deploying the ID verification as a bullying tactic long before anything like that was mandated by ICANN. (Not that ID verification is even mandated now)

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#356

Post by chadcmulligan »

jrockway wrote: post #46
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They put a rude word on their homepage, that makes them edgy and cool and anti-corporation!

"No bullshit" is up there on my corpro-speak charts right along with "synergy" and "innovation". Everyone's website says they're "no bullshit". It's all bullshit.

When my daughter was in high school she was doing an IT subject, for fun I told her to try using "synergy" in one of her assignments. She got an A, its a magic word.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#357

Post by Polylactic_acid »

jonas21 wrote: post #329
jiggawatts wrote: post #310

Just to play devil's advocate: This is in no way different to how Azure, AWS, and GCP operate. They don't have backups either. They too rely on n-way replication, a bit like a distributed RAID. All cloud providers make it absolutely clear, in black & white, that protection of your data is your responsibility , not theirs. What I find hilarious is that most cloud providers only provide built-in backup functionality fo…

That's kind of like saying there's no difference in safety between an airliner and the winged contraption that my idiot brother built in his garage. After all, they both have wings and will both kill you if they fall out of the sky, and I don't see Airbus or Boeing guaranteeing that their planes will never crash, so they must be essentially the same.

>Boeing

That just confirms the parent comment

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#358

Post by o-__-o »

mystcb wrote: post #257
brianwawok wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect a human gets a dump of them and decides which to pay the $10 for. For example, asdasdahbdajsdbajdbhsbdahsdd.com... not worth the $10 ireallylikechicken.com... maybe worth the $10? (ireallylikechicken.com is available, go squat it and get rich)

I am sure, in the past, one of the domain registrars took the liberty of actually registering your searched domain, deliberately, so that you had to go through them to get the domain later on? - I can't remember who it was, but it was an automated process. I know it was very shortly stopped once people complained, but it goes to show that it has been done before. Getting rich off domain's - sounds like a solid busine…

I knew a guy named pachell that did this from 1997-2001 until registrars changed the rule. pachell wherever you are, i miss you

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#359

Post by o-__-o »

danr4 wrote: post #49
EnderMB wrote: post #28

Oof, this Twitter thread looks particularly bad, especially the response from the official Gandi account. https://twitter.com/andreaganduglia/status/12151991477012316... While I appreciate that there are real people behind these companies that are probably having a really rough time right now, the criticism that Gandi are getting as a company is justified - and if Gandi are truly a "no bullshit" company they need to…

Screenshotted in case (when) they delete it https://i.imgur.com/s3R1VVc.png Using memes after permanently losing customer data is extremely disrespectful.

Your mouse pointer.. it looks familiar! https://i.imgur.com/XGK3tFT.png

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#360

Post by ryanlol »

dorfsmay wrote: post #239
Operyl wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They never had a real "no bullshit" policy. When I had my domains with them, I had been asked to verify my identity 34 times in 12 months. 34 separate fucking times. Because "ICANN says so" or some stupid shit (their words, not mine). It stopped the moment I moved to Google Domains, where they asked once and never again. EDIT: And, to make things worse, each time I was threatened with the "confiscation" of my domain,…

On the other hand, i've started using them more for DNS because the one time I forgot my password (typo in password manager I think) they made it very difficult for me to reset it, asked for pieces of ID, phone number registered in my name etc... This is at the time of the stories of other registrars giving customer second and third chances to guess their PIN, or credit card or whatever mechanism they had, and result…

> asked for pieces of ID

This is annoying for everyone but the adversary who can just spend $50 to buy a set of fake ids with your info.

Especially since Gandi doesn’t store your old IDs, they aren’t even going to check if the info on the fakes matches the ones you provided previously.

> phone number registered in my name

I can’t imagine this working very well, just give them a number from a country where they can’t verify who owns the number.

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