This isn’t the first time this has happened to me, just the most recent. 

My wife likes to visit qvc.com.  Their site is broken.   More specifically, I think something is wrong with their DNS.  I can’t really prove much of anything, other than DIGging from both my home in Raleigh and my servers in Dallas prove ineffective.

Details – qvc.com doesn’t come up, but www.qvc.com does.  Right there is already a clue of either poorly managed DNS overall, or something’s gone wrong recently.  I suspect the latter. 

From community.qvc.com – the community area – many links (login and such) go to https://quality-s.qvc.com/…  The quality-s.qvc.com domain never responds. 

Digging at earthlink gives me:

 dig @ns1.earthlink.net qvc.com

;; Query time: 88 msec
;; SERVER: 207.217.126.41#53(207.217.126.41)
;; WHEN: Mon Feb 16 13:59:34 2009
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 111

and against quality-s in particular

dig @ns1.earthlink.net quality-s.qvc.com

;; Query time: 123 msec
;; SERVER: 207.217.126.41#53(207.217.126.41)
;; WHEN: Mon Feb 16 14:00:18 2009
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 121

What I can tell by this (I think) is that I should be using nsX.qvc.com (1,2 or 3).

Digging against any nsX.qvc.com for quality-s.qvc.com brings back:

dig @ns1.qvc.com quality-s.qvc.com

; <<>> DiG 9.4.2-P2 <<>> @ns1.qvc.com quality-s.qvc.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options:  printcmd
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

So, what do you do when you find these sorts of problems?  Who do you contact?  QVC has a “contact us” form located – can you guess where? – on a link at quality-s.qvc.com.  YAY!!! 

I called their 800 number and tried to report the issue but it was of little (or no?) use.  I twittered to ‘behindTheQ’ which is supposedly someone at QVC.  That person is probably off today for President’s Day.

There needs to be some sort of directory that web tech depts can register themselves with to be able to take direct (or indirect – form submissions?) input from tech-savvy users.  The regular ways of communicating in to a company generally direct to you sales or product/service support, with no way of getting real information to real people.

Just like a company needs to have a registered agent to be incorporated in most areas, perhaps a ‘registered agent’ concept for tech depts?

I had a similar issue back in 2001 (or 2002? or 2000?).  Adobe.com’s domain name had been hijacked, and their DNS names were slowly going away.  The main www.adobe.com was up, so most people didn’t notice anything, but weirder FTP server addresses were going away.  I tried to contact anyone at Adobe I could, and had to deal with ‘help desk’ people saying “the website is fine sir – try rebooting your windows 2000 machine”.  I asked if they could actually surf out to the public internet – yahoo, for example.  “No sir,” was the answer.  “So, you’re only looking at your own site from inside your building.  Of course it works for you *there*.  It doesn’t work *outside*.”.  Hung up.  Finally raised enough of a racket that someone from their legal dept called me back and said I was right, but asked me not to say anything – they were dealing with it.  They couldn’t actually *tell* me it was a Chinese org that had hijacked it, but she hadn’t denied it.

Anyway, I’m not suggeting QVC has been hijacked.  It’s just *broken*, and I don’t know how to let anyone *know*!  I’m a customer, trying to make your company better, and I have *no way* of telling you how to do that!  ARGH!

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