One of my clients transferred the domain name "soundfx.com" from OpenSRS to
Register.com on December 7. The registry whois shows register.com as the
current registrar, and whois.register.com shows my client as the owner and
the expiration date as May 30, 2002. The problem is that the domain name is
still listed in my OpenSRS reseller interface with an expiration date of May
30, 2001.
It is only by accident that I discovered the registrar change, so I don't
know if there are other domains in my reseller interface which are no longer
registered with OpenSRS. With renewal time coming up soon, I do NOT want to
bill clients for domain names they have moved away from me! There has been
a lot of talk about NSI billing for domain names which are no longer
registered with them, and it is generally viewed as negligent, if not
fraudulent. At the very least it is unprofessional. I feel I am in danger
of doing the same thing.
Is there a process in place to reconcile the OpenSRS database with the
shared registry? If so, how often does it happen (i.e. how long after a
registrar transfer could a domain name still appear in the RWI)?
Because of the way OpenSRS implements whois, querying the registry whois
first, the problem doesn't show up there. But I don't want to check the
whois for every domain name prior to billing for renewal!
Is it possible register.com did not notify OpenSRS prior to transferring the
domain? This would be even more frightening.
I hope this is just one isolated glitch in the system, but I fear it may be
more widespread.
Chuck Hatcher
