www.earthsystemcog.org domain registration and use.

[martinjuckes]

The domain registration for www.earthsystemcog.org is expiring.

Content is being migrated (see #1 ).

Link using the earthsystemcog.org domain name have been placed in many CMIP6 documents (e.g. 25 times in Balaji et al. 2018). The data request paper used forwarding from w3id.org, which needs updating (issue to be raised).

This raises two issues:

(1) Should the name be registered to prevent abuse (there is a market for domain names which have gained trust and can be used to deceive people -- I don't know the details, but STFC policy is to retain domain names long after use). I believe that STFC could pick up domain registration (we already hold the registration for cfconventions.org).

(2) Should we try to preserve links ... or, easier, direct www.earthsystemcog.org to a page which gives information about the migration?

[taylor13]

@martinjuckes Regarding 1) directly above, are you saying that www.earthsystemcog.org could be relocated to STFC and that all the old links would then be resolvable?

Regarding (2), if www.earthsystemcog.org is expiring, is it still possible to redirect from that address to some other page? And how can links be "preserved" as opposed to the old links being redirected to new ones?

(Sorry, I'm ignorant about this stuff; maybe others with more knowledge could offer opinions.)

[martinjuckes]

Hi @taylor13

The risk if we do nothing is that somebody else takes over www.earthsystemcog.org and puts up a site which is loaded with malicious cookies or offensive content.

The way this works is that you register the domain earthsystemcog.org with a DNS provider, and then instruct them to link it to a server of your choice -- and configure the server to associate incoming requests with a specific HTML service running on the server. The DNS provider hosts a very small range of metadata for each domain which is understood and shared globally across the internet routing infrastructure, with the result that browsers looking for www.earthsystemcog.org get directed to the server named in the instructions to the DNS provider.

Rather than setting up a server, it is very easy to use a github repo as the target of the DNS requests ... this is how the CF Conventions site now works with a DNS record registered at STFC directed to a github repo managed by Ethan et al.

The simple option is to register www.earthsystemcog.org, and create a single page on a server which tells people that the site has been migrated to a new domain. This both prevents malicious re-use and helps people on their way to the new pages.

Creating re-directs for individual pages, so that somebody who clicks on https://www.earthsystemcog.org/projects/wip/ lands at the new home page on github is also possible, but a bit harder. I'm not sure that we would have resources to do this in the next few months.

[martinjuckes]

WIP meeting, 3rd Nov: CEDA should register the domain name.

[durack1]

It seems the current registrant is U. Colorado, and I am guessing @LucaCinquini

see https://lookup.icann.org/lookup

[martinjuckes]

@durack1 : is it OK if I create WCRP-CMIP.github.io repository to manage a landing page for www.earthsystemcog.org? I'll just put a single page there, with links to the public WIP pages, ES-DOC, and the data request.

[durack1]

@martinjuckes to be honest, and to make things simple from a repo-point-of-view, I think we just configure the re-registered earthsystemcog.org to point to the WIP main page (https://WCRP-CMIP.github.io/WGCM_Infrastructure_Panel) and not bother with another redundant repo that will do nothing.

While we're at it, we should probably delete (or clean up) the other stale repos here: the CMIP6_DataRequest_CF_issues and package haven't been touched in 4 years

[durack1]

Happy to hear from @matthew-mizielinski and @taylor13 on alternative views

[taylor13]

As I understand it, earthsystemcog.org hosted lots of projects besides our WIP "project". So do we want folks attempting to get to https://www.earthsystemcog.org/projects/esmf/ , for example, redirected to https://WCRP-CMIP.github.io/WGCM_Infrastructure_Panel ? I don't think so. Best for the WIP is that any URL starting with https://www.earthsystemcog.org/projects/wip/ be redirected to CMIP.github.io/WGCM_Infrastructure_Panel and everything else under https://www.earthsystemcog.org/ be redirected elsewhere.

[martinjuckes]

@durack1 , @taylor13 : I can only redirect https://www.earthsystemcog.org to one place ... and, because to the concern, that Karl has raised above, that not everybody going to the domain will be looking for the WIP, I think it is better if it goes somewhere other than https://WCRP-CMIP.github.io/WGCM_Infrastructure_Panel.

The purpose of the WCRP-CMIP.github.io repo would be to deal with the lost souls looking for the former contents of https://www.earthsystemcog.org ... a good enough reason to exist, I think. It has to be WCRP-CMIP.github.io in order to have a page we can edit at the domain base (i.e. at https://www.earthsystemcog.org) .. all other repos start at https://www.domain.name/repo-name.

[durack1]

@martinjuckes I wonder if we need to do this at all, at the moment https://earthsystemcog.org/ and https://www.earthsystemcog.org/ is broken, and probably has been for quite sometime

It could be an opportunity to drop yet another task on our to-do list

[durack1]

@martinjuckes if you are adamant that you want to do this, then we could create a earthsystemcog repo under the WCRP-CMIP organization which makes it as explicit as possible - although I would think we'd first like to ponder my #2 (comment)

[taylor13]

But https://www.earthsystemcog.org/projects/wip/ isn't broken and neither are any of the links under that. We would like all the wip and sub-wip links to be resolved even after the original earthsystemcog.org goes away.

[durack1]

Wow this is bad, even https://www.earthsystemcog.org/projects/ doesn't resolve. I wonder how long it's been bad for?

I was curious, so it happened sometime between 11th February 2019 and the 13th May 2019, ouch

This has been broken for more than a year

[martinjuckes]

@durack1 : in order for the page at https://www.earthsystemcog.org/projects/wip/ to work, there needs to be a functioning domain www.earthsytemcog.org. What I can do at STFC is register the domain. The domain registration allows this domain to be associated with one IP address, it cannot redirect different URLs to different places, it only deals with the domain itself.

We can do more redirects at the IP address .. but the first thing to do is set up a site that we can point the www.earthsystemcog.org.

I can fix this with a WCRP-CMIP.github.io repo, otherwise I think you will have to find someone else to look after it.

[taylor13]

Sorry, I'm hopelessly ignorant about this, but when you say "The domain registration allows this domain to be associated with one IP address; it cannot redirect different URLs to different places", I assume all the URL's referencing pages in that domain (e.g., https://www.earthsystemcog.org/projects/wip/ will land at a single URL at the IP address e.g. ( https://www.earthsystemcog.org/????). Is that how it works?

[martinjuckes]

The domain registration tells the global internet where to send someone when they ask for a URL ... it associates a domain with an IP address or range of IP addresses. So when someone clicks on https://www.earthsystemcog.org/projects/wip/ , the request generated by their browser gets passed to the machine identified by the IP address in the DNS record.

The machine at the IP address also needs to be configured: a single host machine can support many different domains and needs to know how each of them are dealt with. In the case of github pages we have fairly limited configuration options. We can configure WCRP-CMIP.github.io so that requests for https://www.earthsystemcog.org/...... are associated with the web pages published through WCRP-CMIP.github.io. This configuration tells github what to do when a request for this domain is routed through to the github servers.

We could then create a docs/projects/wip/index.md file in the github repo to receive request for https://www.earthsystemcog.org/projects/wip/ .. but I don't think it would be sustainable or worthwhile to create repo files for large numbers of current CoG URLs. docs/projects/wip/index.md could contain a simple piece of html to redirect people to the new WIP site.

Anyone trying to get to a URL that we don't recreate will get a 404 error message. We can, I believe, create our own 404 page with helpful information about the migration from CoG.

[martinjuckes]

@durack1 , @taylor13 : I'll need to do something about this soon, in order to take over the domain before the current registration expires.

If you want to avoid having WCRP-CMIP.github.io used for this, another alternative is to create a new github organisation called, perhaps, earthsystemcog-legacy or use the existing github.com/earthsystemcog repo. The last option might be cleaner ... Cecilia about it.