The curious thing, which I mentioned on the radio, is that CIS has significant assets both physical and virtual and could very easily sell the business to another provider or allow someone to come in and run the business for a fee. None of it makes much rational sense. But then everyone kind of knew that Bob always did things for his own reasons.

Here are your options:

• If you are an individual subscriber to CIS with just cis.net e-mail on the line
• I advise you to get with Iowa Telecom, Qwest or Mediacom and get on with your life. Unless CIS comes back up for some period that will allow customers to make an orderly transition, there is no way to access e-mails, address books or web pages on those servers.
• If you like webmail, get a Yahoo or Gmail account and get on with your life. Hopefully, you have a local copy of frequently used e-mail addresses and you can send a message to friends and customers that your address has changed.
• If you have web pages that you don’t have a local backup for, check the Internet Archive for a recent copy of your web page. You should be able to suck down most of the content from there.
• Business customers. CIS registered its own and its customers’ domains with Network Solutions LLC one of the major domain registrars. Get a copy of a billing statement from CIS that specifically states that you were charged X for registering and/or hosting your domain.
• Call Network Solutions at 1-800-333-7680 and explain what has happened and that you would like the administrative records for your domain transferred to your control
• Be patient and work the process. Network Solutions has had its own problems with customer service in the past.
• If you still run into a brick wall or you feel like going after CIS for loss of business, call a lawyer that has familiarity with Internet and intellectual property law. I have been using Des Moines attorney, Brett Trout as my resource on this issue. He gave a presentation at Ignite IT in Ames a couple of years ago and I was quite impressed.

Riverfront Technology is partnering with a Quad Cities-based web hosting and web development company to offer migration assistance and new virtual digs for homeless CIS domains. My advice here is that if you have a business that relies on the web and e-mail for day-to-day transactions don’t wait for Network Solutions, register a new domain now, get your web site back up and running. When you finally get your old domain back, it can be merged with the temporary one so that it will appear to be transparent to the user regardless of whether they use olddomain.com or newdomain.com.

Locally, it is a much different story. In the early years of the Internet Age, waaay back in 1996 or so, CIS Internet was a pioneer. A local link to this whole Interweb superhighway thingie. He was the first locally available wireless service provider for residents and businesses outside the service area of Mediacom and DSL.

Recently though, CIS has been characterized by poor to nonexistent customer service. Bob as primary technical contact was so irascible he made Gary Boden look like the milkman of human kindness. He maintained a sense of entitlement to private and public locations where he had been allowed to install antennas for his wireless service. Basically, it was Bob’s Internet and we were lucky to have it.

In the last several months a number of businesses had contacted us at Riverfront Technology saying that their CIS connection had been down for several days and they could not get a response from CIS. Some of these were very prominent citizens and businesses. We simply shrugged our shoulders and helped them transition to another provider.

We speculated that Bob probably owned all the equipment outright, having long since paid for everything. Therefore aside from his bandwidth bill from his upstream provider every month, everything else he made was profit. Ergo, he just didn’t give a shit about his customers any more. Those what worked would continue to send him money and to hell with those who didn’t. He would ride the gravy train as far as it went, so the theory went.

Of course that level of service was bound to draw unwanted attention and we heard that the Iowa Attorney General’s office began fielding complaints earlier this year.

So, no real shock when we learned today that CIS seemed to have been completely down since Monday-ish.

Not shocking per se, but surprisingly dickheaded.

Because he didn’t completely turn things off. He turned off his DNS servers for sure, which means that most of cis.net is un-findable to the world. But he must either have some services hosted elsewhere or still have something running. Mail for example: cis.net and other domains he hosts appear to still be accepting mail as usual instead of being down and out and rendering the mail undeliverable.

This means that everyone sending mail to cis.net and the domains hosted there thinks everything is normal and has no idea why no one is replying to them.

Furthermore, for those people who use web-based e-mail they can’t get to their mail. Maybe ever. And for those people who have domains hosted with CIS (KROS Radio, for one) those domains will now be in limbo until control of them can be wrested from the smoldering hulk of CIS and transferred to new web hosting companies. That is if those companies had good, current copies of their websites.

We have had some reports that Bob has been in touch with the authorities, calling from an undisclosed location (I’m totally not kidding!) and claiming to have been cut off by his upstream provider, Qwest. He has promised to try to get his customers access to their sites. I’m dubious. One, unless he was totally daft (a distinct possibility, I’ll grant you) he would never have had only one upstream provider. He should have had at least a DSL line or a Mediacom connection for emergency failover. Two, if he was shutting the doors and wanted to do the right thing, he could have just handed the backup tapes (assuming they exist) ot the keys to the server room to someone who could help out all those people who provided him with a rather comfy little living for the past ten-plus years.

Riverfront Technology is offering help sifting through the rubble and relocating.

There are also a couple of companies already sniffing about looking to pick up on the wireless ISP market in Clinton. So, it might all end up being for the good. Sure is good riddance to CIS, which was a walking corpse for a long time.