[92014] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Spain was offline
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven M. Bellovin)
Thu Aug 31 13:46:05 2006
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 13:44:54 -0400
From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@cs.columbia.edu>
To: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu
Cc: Peter Corlett <abuse@cabal.org.uk>, NANOG <nanog@merit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <200608311703.k7VH3c01010539@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On Thu, 31 Aug 2006 13:03:38 -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
> On Thu, 31 Aug 2006 17:30:37 BST, Peter Corlett said:
>
> > OTOH, I can believe that somebody broke a Perl script critical to it
> > and it rolled out a valid, but empty, zonefile which the secondaries
> > faithfully replicated. Not that I've watched cascading DNS failures
> > at too many places with bits of crufty Perl, oh no...
>
> ISTR some database extract failing in a new and unusual way a few years
> ago, and about 1/3 of the entire .com domain evaporolated for several hours....
>
This is an old, old story -- such failures have been with us for a long
time. Not all that many years ago, the entire (US) 800 number system was
down for a similar reason -- the program that populated the production
database from the back end master copies hiccupped, and things got *very*
confused.
For many more stories like this, see the archives of the RISKS Digest
(http://www.risks.org).
--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
