I have a bunch of domains that I do nothing with, but one of the ones I use the most is the Tongan-registered elli.to. This has been the domain I talk about in my post about 1Password, which I use for a large number of wildcard email addresses. It turns out that elli.to was a stupid choice for two reasons: firstly, it looks like I’ve misspelt my own name (trying to explain to a bunch of non-technical people that “the .ot TLD doesn’t exist!” has gone poorly, historically). Less embarrassingly, but ultimately more importantly, the use of the .to meant using the “register.to” registrar. Early in 2023, that registrar’s and they were uncermoniously de-authorised to be a reseller of .to domains.

There was a sumptuous lack of warning - before or after the event - about this change in status. The domain silently expired without warning - because the registrar was functionally dead and didn’t send me a reminder as I had become lazily dependent on.

A few days after this - presumably after the last of the cached results for the domain’s MX results expired - I noticed the emails for this domain had stopped. After confirming that it was a DNS problem with dig, I attempted to sign into Register.to just to be greeted with a maintenance page. After three days of the that maintenance page, I started to realise that I was an idiot and this was a bigger problem that a sloppily lapsed domain name.

Well-written IaC feels like magic

I’ve use(d) this domain for all sorts of things beyond vanity email; the most complex use of it involves the cross-geo k3s cluster as a homelab. Each node - some bare metal, some cloud instances, some VPSs - can route to each other via Tailscale, but using an elli.to DNS entry.

The control plane failed, as all inter-node communication was configured to use the DNS names rather than static Tailscale IP addresses. The cluster was hard down as a result.

I had made the decision early on to migrate everything to a .com based domain name (see below for more on why). For once, being an insufferable SRE with an intolerable devotion to Infrastructure-as-Code was an asset rather than a social hinderance. Four lines edited in Terraform, and one (!) line changed in Ansible, was enough to rebuild the k3s cluster and re-create the email set-up I had previously.

Luckily this k3s cluster is purely for experimentation / learning, which means I can - and often am - be liberal with data persistence and can tolerate losing all the data in the cluster.

The final straw: whoami, really?

When I originally registered elli.to, Namecheap - my registrar of choice - didn’t support the .to TLD, hence why I went with an unknown registrar. Tonic.to - are the IANA-listed registrar for the domain, and are able to administer domains previously registered at Register.to.

After reaching out to the hostmaster at Tonic, I was able to register an account with them and renew the domain name. As appreciative as I was for the help - I didn’t ever really prove who I was!. I could’ve been an opportunistic domain squatter, claiming I was the previous registrant and seizing control of the domain. Now I was back in control of the domain it meant I could replace it over a longer period of time, rather than the rush to move all my logins at once to the new .com.

elli.to now semi-safely resides under the management of Namecheap, but I still worry about the wider .to ecosystem. Soon - it will suffer the fate we all do at the end of our natural lives; becoming a CNAME for a younger, fitter domain name.

Post-script

If the title doesn’t make much sense to you: "it's all gone Pete Tong".