Up-to-date information about dns or network problems - Help?

[Brad Knowles]

At 4:05 PM +0200 2005-05-26, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

>  Why should a power failure in Moscow stop ".ru" resolution? ".ru" has
>  several name servers and at least one is very far from Moscow (but
>  close from my office).

	The problem is that there was an extensive power outage 
throughout the region, and while the ccTLD servers for .ru may have 
been fine, something like 80% of the network traffic to Russia goes 
through a single exchange in Moscow, and when it lost power (without 
generator backup), that ended up effectively wiping out all traffic 
into the country.

	Yes, other exchanges and providers tried to fall back to other 
routes, but when 80% of your capacity is suddenly gone the end result 
is that congestion ends up wiping out the other 20%.


	It's like "Black Tuesday" for AOL.  There were nameservers 
registered to aol.com that were hosted at ANS, and were reachable 
during the 19 hour downtime.  But there were no packets you could get 
into or out of the network, so having those external nameservers 
didn't really buy you much of anything.


	Anyway, see the thread on NANOG.  That's a more appropriate place 
for this discussion.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.