I know this is not a WISP issue per se. In our local area there was a network
admin for a large company who on the side setup about a hundred websites for
local small business and individuals. Last month he took his wife's life and
then killed himself. No other family left and no one to
Lookup the IP of the website through ARIN (just nslookup www.site.com),
see who the IPs are assigned to. If they are sub-assigned to a smaller
ISP, it should tell you that.
Contact the ISP, explain the situation. Then it will depend on them.
Hopefully it is a smaller shop and not GoDaddy or
Start by doing a whois for each domain to see if the domain is actually
in the customers name or the guy who setup the site. Finding the
hosting site can be difficult, but you might be able to tell from the
nameserver data on the whois, or reverse lookup the IP of the domain and
do an ARIN
Trace it down from the web name (www.foobar.com) and find where the IP
leads you. Maybe at his house or some datacenter.
If they're all simple HTML pages, you could just spider the content
and make DNS changes.
Josh Luthman
Office: 937-552-2340
Direct: 937-552-2343
1100 Wayne St
Suite 1337
If they are not listed as the registrant on the domain they will need to
provide proof to the registrar to get control of their domain. If they
are listed as the registrant they should be able to transfer their
domain to a new registrar account.
As for access to the content on the server,
How big a problem will depend on who the registrant of the domain names
is. If the domains were actually in the name of the deceased individual
that could be a real mess. If, however, he did the registration, but
listed something more or less resembling the name of each business as the
Subject: [WISPA] Website owner
I know this is not a WISP issue per se. In our local area there was a
network admin for a large company who on the side setup about a hundred
websites for local small business and individuals. Last month he took his
wife's life and then killed himself. No other family
Agree with others on the domain stuff. If you can get access to the
domain, but can't get access to the content - we've used HTTrack to
download a client's site and then put it up on our servers as their
host. If it's a CMS this won't work, but it works for HTML sites.
Martha
Martha Huizenga
