On 14 December 1999, John Woodard wrote:-

I know this is off topic but a good friend has asked me to register a .co.uk domain name for him. Where is the best place to do this? Didn't one of you work for an ISP in Norwich somewhere?

It depends on what you want to do with it. I now work for NetDirect in London (a far cry from the days in Norwich) which operate NDO which gives a fee-free subscription and a free .co.uk or .org.uk domain. The downside to this is that if you ever wanted to transfer the domain to another ISP for whatever reason, it costs £88 + VAT. There are no server logs, unless you use these freebie tracking things. That said, you can upload and check mail from any other ISPs (unlike some other companies I can mention), you get 20Mb web space and unlimited email aliases on the domain.

http://www.instant.ndo.com - but this is really if you're running windows. If you're running Linux, you want to visit:

http://signup.netdirect-online.co.uk/ie4-win32

instead. Sign-up for an NDO account, and then dialed into the NDO account you've created, you can then visit http://www.ndoplus.co.uk to register the domain. I can recommend this option, since I look after this service :)

If, on the other hand, you want some more control with the domain, I hear that http://www.portland.co.uk will do some decent free hosting, and http://www.the-name.co.uk will do cheap domain registrations.

See also:-

http://www.net4nowt.co.uk

and

http://www.12free.co.uk

for other deals out there.

He also wants a file and print server to replace an old Mac box that has died. Samba? I think so.

Yeah - that would work, and well too. It's just a shame we rely heavily on NT boxes for internal stuff here at NetDirect. :(

Regards,

Martyn