H went down.

Published: 2010-10-03. Last Updated: 2011-01-24 23:33:51 UTC
by Adrien de Beaupre (Version: 1)
2 comment(s)

Well the bad news is the H root servers were not available for over 18 hours. The good news is that practically nobody noticed. As it turns out a fiber cut and poor weather took out access to this cluster of root DNS servers. https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2010-October/006142.html shows the explanation for the outage. While the outage had no direct impact on Internet users, it does point out the necessity of proper design for redundancy. Graph of the H availability:

Cheers,
Adrien de Beaupré
Intru-shun.ca Inc.

Keywords: denial of service dns root servers
2 comment(s)

Comments

This is awful. DNS is a robust protocol - but not a replacement for diversity (and backups).

Unless someone wrote "the service doesn't need to survive single-point failures." in the requirements document, it's woefully underengineered.

Dom De Vitto

Oct 3rd 2010
1 decade ago

It's not underengineered. Nameservers use a hints file. Other roots use AnyCast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nameserver#Root_server_addresses

jtaylor

Oct 3rd 2010
1 decade ago

Login here to join the discussion.


Top of page
Diary Archives