.ga domain names soon to return to Gabonese management (from Freenom) [pdf]

I&#x27;ve been working in a project in the free subdomain space that may help some people impacted by Freenom&#x27;s failure.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.getlocalcert.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.getlocalcert.net</a> offers free subdomains that are compatible with Let&#x27;s Encrypt (including wildcard certs) but you&#x27;ve got to setup split-DNS on your local network as we don&#x27;t allow public routing or email.<p>My hope is that this enables free subdomains for private use while avoiding the mess of self-signed certs and the spammer&#x2F;malware issues that appear to have killed Freenom and plague FreeDNS.<p>Still in the early days, so there&#x27;s some kinks getting worked out. I set up a number of ACME clients and web servers for demo just last week: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;robalexdev&#x2F;getlocalcert-client-tests">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;robalexdev&#x2F;getlocalcert-client-tests</a>

Freenom sucks; sad they&#x27;re gone, so many domains lost.<p>But just to be exhaustive, Freenom was not the only place one were able to register a .ga domain: I still use a .ga domain registered a few years ago at France-DNS -- which merged with &#x2F; was acquired by NETIM recently.<p>Registering the domain through a &quot;real registar&quot; allowed me to get something more reliable (than a free domain on Freenom) as well as whois privacy.<p>The official Gabonese whois&#x2F;registar website [1] seems to be down at the moment but never seemed very legit&#x2F;pro to me... [2] &amp; [3]<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.my.ga&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.my.ga&#x2F;</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220623223503&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.my.ga&#x2F;en&#x2F;index.html?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220623223503&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.my.ga&#x2F;...</a> [3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20230423231601&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.my.ga&#x2F;en&#x2F;index.html?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20230423231601&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.my.ga&#x2F;...</a>

&gt; This server could not prove that it is aninf.ga; its security certificate is from aazerp.ga. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection.<p>Sign of competence by the new management organisation.

I remember back in the day, I had a free .tk domain. Good times. Apparently dot.TK was run by Freenom as well.<p>I had a look in Wayback machine to see if they had a copy of my old site. But the first snapshot of the domain in the Wayback machine archive seems to have been after some random Chinese website started using the domain instead of me.<p>Makes sense though that the Wayback machine does not have my pages in their archive, I was in upper secondary school at the time and the only people that visited my website was probably myself and a handful of my friends from school.<p>I also went to dot.TK to see if it was possible to re-register my old .tk domain, but the search didn’t work. Guess if Freenom is giving up it may already be impossible to use dot.TK anymore.

I&#x27;ve always been wanting to register a 2 letter domain on .ga though have never been able to. Their old site made it seems technically possible though every registrar I&#x27;ve tried fails in some way or another.

Alright. May the .io tld follow suit.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;.io#Controversy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;.io#Controversy</a>

Some notes about flushing GA zone:<p>- Whois ga server address: WEB+WHOIS whois.nic.ga (use whois -h whois.nic.ga some.domain.ga).<p>- Domains like TELE.GA got auto-transition. They were registered via Gandi (was not Freenom reseller? huh).<p>Now they have whois &quot;Date de création: 2023-06-05T00:00:00Z&quot;. Exactly at midnight.<p>- Domain like GOOGLE.GA got VIP service. Engineer reported the problem at Mon Jun 5 02:33:22 UTC 2023 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.dns-oarc.net&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;dns-operations&#x2F;2023-June&#x2F;022083.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.dns-oarc.net&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;dns-operations&#x2F;2023-Jun...</a>).<p>Less than 48 hours they&#x27;ve registered a new registrar(!) Markmonitor at ANINF (There is no such registrar in the list <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mon.ga&#x2F;english.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mon.ga&#x2F;english.html</a>). Faster than light.<p>- Domains like ASTI.GA spent around $25(year fee) + $50(corporate fee for manual processing) and registered domain via Gandi in a small window of time.<p>- Registrar Netim: $18 till end of month, then $26 per year.<p>- All other PAID ga domains squatted via Safe Names registrar around 2023-06-06 15:00. They pointed a delegation on one (sick!) NS server ns03.freenom.com<p>So you can switch delegation at freenom&#x27;s dashboard to &quot;Use default nameservers (Freenom Nameservers)&quot; and set up needed records (only A, AAAA, CNAME, TXT, MX, LOC, NAPTR, RP).<p>- You cannot register at Safe Names site: Error &quot;Update Unsuccessful Please fix the missing or invalid Data&quot;. All data is filled in.<p>Awesome businass.<p>- All registered domains have 06.06.2023 - 06.06.2024, 1 year registration.<p>- Same [s]sh..[&#x2F;s] with ML zone. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agetic.gouv.ml&#x2F;note-dinformation-relative-au-rapatriement-de-la-gestion-technique-du-point-ml&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agetic.gouv.ml&#x2F;note-dinformation-relative-au-rapatri...</a> They wanted to switch at the end of March 2023, but nothing seems to have happened.

Freenom has been in decline for a while.<p>It was great for a quick free domain for a temporary site - until all the phishers and spammers made the free extensions untrustworthy.<p>Swapped to using subdomains of a short domain I own for the few domains I had left at Freenom, ready for this moment.<p>I imagine .ml, .cf and .gq will be close behind.

Uh, let&#x27;s see what will happen to the most abused free fishing domain, .TK as operated also by freenom. I use that and I am a bit worried by the spammers. Though freenom recently got better killing those.

06.06 - PAID domains squatted by safenames (with 15 hrs delay)<p>12.06 - they pointed proper (before flushing) NS records. And broke it again, cause they took TOO old ns records (I&#x27;ve pointed to improper he.net servers once, with changing to proper in end)<p>Nobody answers, so PRETY GOOD JOB SO FAR

Whelp, there goes my personal site. DNS already stopped routing yesterday. Would&#x27;ve been great if the other registrars mentioned were actually allowing address transfers. Only one of them would allow a transfer and they wanted nearly $30&#x2F;yr for it! For that much I&#x27;ll just go get a .com for 1&#x2F;3 the price...

Happy to hear, rather Gabonese management than Freenom, such an awful company in every way.

Is there anything to do if you &quot;own&quot; a .GA domain? I registered once a free .GA domain via freenom and would like to keep it.

All it would take is everyone to shift DNS servers, to say a project like OpenNIC [1] and the internet would be freer of capitalistic data packets.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opennic.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opennic.org&#x2F;</a>

Just found out that my NAS is no longer available, didn’t get any heads up about the end of service. Naturally this happens when your on holiday, 2000km from home.

blancia.ga