Millions of .de Domains Unreachable For Hours
83
An anonymous reader writes "Due to an error on behalf of DENIC, the German DNS registrar for second-level .de domains, millions of .de domains fell over the edge (auf Deutsch) of the Internet today. The cause of this GAU (GröYter anzunehmender Unfall = maximum credible accident) is still unknown, as DENIC officials haven't answered any questions from journalists at the time of writing."
Re:auf Deutsch? (Score:5, Informative)
Why complain? It's nothing else than the typical bad work of the so called "editors" of slashdot. They also did not notice that a charset conversion error occured. The german phrase is "Größter anzunehmender Unfall", not "GröYter anzunehmender Unfall". But why should we expect that paid editors do actually work?
Re:Sad (Score:1, Informative)
Good miss. The word you were grasping at is Scheisse.
Re:auf Deutsch? (Score:2, Informative)
Stop calling it root server (Shame on you, Golem.de!). The root servers serve the root zone, which contains the top level domains. The affected servers in this incident were the de-TLD servers which serve the second level domain records.
Some more details about the outage (Score:5, Informative)
The problem did not affect all domains and it did not affect all nameservers for the german TLD. The nameservers which are reached through "c.de.net" (== c.nic.de) and "s.de.net" (== s.nic.de) more or less worked fine during the outage. Only for a short period of time they did not answer. The other nameservers for .de however lost the knowledge of most domains under the TLD and only returned NS-records for the domain names starting with a digit or with the letter a to e. So for example br-online.de worked fine, while web.de did not. The really bad part is, that the affected nameservers did not refrain to answer but instead answered with NXDOMAIN. So they told that they do not have a record for the query, which in turn effects to "This domain does not exist". Unfortunately such negative answers are cached for a time determined by the authorative nameserver. DENIC's nameserver tell clients to cache this result for 7200 seconds, therefore the outage continued to make problems for up to two hours after the problem was fixed, unless the DNS caches were cleared.
One more thing to notice: Some sites claim that four of the six nameservers for .de were affected because six hostnames are listed as nameservers for .de and as i told, two of them did work. However both a.nic.de and z.nic.de resolv to anycast IPs which will be routed to a number of different servers around the world depending on your own location. So it are more than six servers in total.
Re:auf Deutsch? (Score:1, Informative)
If you want to troll, look for a better online translator.
Everything after "Amerikaner" is gibberish.
Re:auf Deutsch? (Score:4, Informative)
Also, "GAU" is probably better translated as "worst-case scenario".
K.I.S.S.? (Score:3, Informative)
you mean "Keep it simple, stupid"?
the KISS principle is perhaps one of the greatest principles in engineering, and frequently keeps people's minds grounded in the deliverables, and prevents them from spinning out of control into overly complex solutions, which are in fact the source of most software bugs, not the solution to them
if this is the principle you are referring to, i don't know where the source of your animosity to it lies, nor why it has anything to do with this particular subject matter
Re:We call that... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Some more details about the outage (Score:5, Informative)
According to the DENIC registrar's mailing list, this was just an administrative fuckup. DENIC apparently runs Bind, (on at least the 4 affected logical servers) and they reloaded Bind with an empty zone file. Since the six logical servers are all authoritative, the empty-zone-file servers replied with NXDOMAIN (as they should have).
The parent is correct, non-existent domain responses should only be cached for 2 hours.
Since .de is the largest ccTLD (by count of registrations), this is a pretty big deal. On April 3 2010, there were 13.5 million [domainnews.com] registered .de domains. I wonder how long it took Bind to start with that many zones!
Re:auf Deutsch? (Score:2, Informative)
But HTML entities work!
Re:Schon. (Score:3, Informative)