Note to self: pay your bills!
I SSH between my many computers several times in the course of a day. Today when I went to SSH to my web server I couldn't quite figure out what was wrong. I could ping the IP address but SSH just didn't want to work. I tried restarting the SSH daemon and when that didn't work, I rebooted the entire box. After it still didn't work, it finally hit me: I forgot to renew my domain name and it was set to expire on July 17th! To confirm, I did a simple dig lookup:
; <<>> DiG 9.4.2-P2 <<>> xaero.org
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 46405
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;xaero.org. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
xaero.org. 85511 IN A 69.46.228.231
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
xaero.org. 85511 IN NS expired-domain-ns50.directnic.com.
xaero.org. 85511 IN NS expired-domain-ns51.directnic.com.
;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Mon Jul 20 13:08:14 2009
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 124
Oops!! Needless to say, I very quickly renewed my domain name and within a few short hours my nameservers were happily serving up DNS again. Thankfully my registrar provides a grace period for renewing expired domains so they don't immediately get thrown back into the available pot. Next time I'll stamp a sticky note on my forehead.