My client CS called this morning about DNS problems he was having with his colo facility. I logged into the name server there and didn't see any problems; I had set things up correctly there. I checked his webserver—again, things were fine.
He then had me call the colo facility to resolve the issue.
The solid animal waste product, as they say, hit the external rotary thermal cooling unit.
Okay, technically, perhaps I should not have had access to the nameserver there, but I did, and I saved the colo facility staff time in adding DNS entries on behalf of my client. It might also be said I might have been lead into believing that my client and the colo facility in question had an arrangement and they didn't mind me adding the entries—it's not like they would have had any difficulty in figuring out what I was doing by checking the various logs (like utmp, wtmp and sulog for indeed it was a Unix server) and configuration files (it seemed at one point they fixed a typo on my part).
But it seems that in these uncertain financial times of the colo facility company any revenue is welcome and I found out that by bypassing them I was costing them $50 per domain.
PER DOMAIN!
They were charging $50 per domain to add a simple zone file to their DNS server. I told my client a few weeks before he should register his colocated box as a DNS server to the root DNS servers but he didn't follow through on it, otherwise this would have never happened.
It was shortly thereafter I learned that my access to the name server was removed. Inconvient for my client, but fortunately I had removed any reliance I had upon that nameserver.
$50 per domain. Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.