[87747] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: QWest is having some pretty nice DNS issues right now
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Daniel Golding)
Sat Jan 7 18:03:33 2006
Date: Sat, 07 Jan 2006 18:02:36 -0500
From: Daniel Golding <dgolding@burtongroup.com>
To: Steve Gibbard <scg@gibbard.org>, <nanog@merit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20060106181727.T53002@sprockets.gibbard.org>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On 1/6/06 9:54 PM, "Steve Gibbard" <scg@gibbard.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 6 Jan 2006, william(at)elan.net wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 6 Jan 2006, Wil Schultz wrote:
>>
>>> Apparently they have lost two authoritative servers. ETA is unknown.
>>
>> You forgot to mention that they only have two authoritative servers for
>> most of their domains...
>
[snip]
>
> So from my uninformed vantage point, it looks like they started doing this
> more or less right -- two servers or clusters of servers in two different
> facilities, a few thousand miles apart on different power grids and not
> subject to the same natural disasters. In other words, they did the hard
> part. What they didn't do is put them in different BGP routes, which for
> a network with as much IP space as Qwest has would seem fairly easy.
> While it's tempting to make fun of Qwest here, variations on this theme --
> working hard on one area of design while ignoring another that's also
> critical -- are really common. It's something we all need to be careful
> of.
>
> Or, not having seen what happened here, the problem could have been
> something completely different, perhaps even having nothing to do with
> routing or network topology. In that case, my general point would remain
> the same, but this would be a bad example to use.
>
> -Steve
At some point in a carrier's growth, Anycast DNS has got to become a best
practice. Are there many major carriers that don't do it today, or am I just
a starry-eyed idealist?
- Dan
