14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s Windows Live Custom Domains (.homeserver.com)/ Windows Server Solutions Dynamic DNS will suffer a temporary outage today, January 11th, 2011, the company informed. According to Microsoft’s Jonas Svensson, the downtime is necessary in order to upgrade the service providing free domain name resolution for a number of Windows Server operating systems to the Windows Azure platform.
The software giant is working to boost the stability and performance of the service, focusing on making sure that customers running new Windows Server products set for release in the first half of 2011 will enjoy the best support possible.
“The service will be unavailable for updates during a 24 hour period. If your IP address changes during this time you will lose remote access to your home or business. This includes records on the .homeserver.com and .remotewebaccess.com domain names,” Svensson warned.
In the case in which customers will not experience an IP address change simultaneously with the outage, they will also not be impacted by the service’s transition to Windows Azure in any manner.
The Redmond giant explained that users running such platforms as Home Server (v1), Windows Server Codename “Vail”, Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials Beta, and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials Beta can be impacted.
“If your Internet Service Provider does change your IP address during this outage, you may see the following errors:
• Alerts from your server’s console stating a failure to update your custom domain name
• Clients on the Internet may fail to connect to the Remote Access website hosted on your server.
• Any 3rd party add-ins that rely on the remote access functionality may fail,” Svensson explained.
Customers will simply have to wait for the service to go back online. Furthermore, no actual action is required from them to resolve the errors. The operating systems mentioned above are designed to resolve all the issues automatically.
Provided that the domain name is not working even after the upgrade is complete, then customers can manually resolve the problem.
They need to fire up the Windows Home Server Console (Dashboard), go to Settings, select Remote Access and hit Repair.
“If you are using a domain provider from your OEM such as the HP Personal Domain Name by TZO.com or TZO.com custom domain name providers, your domain and network will be unaffected during this outage.
“Additionally, if you are using a vanity domain name from eNom or GoDaddy for your server, then your domain and network will be unaffected by this outage,” Svensson added.