Army DNS ROOT Server Down For 18+ Hours 154
An anonymous reader writes "The H-Root server, operated by the US Army Research Lab, spent 18 hours out of the last 48 being a void. Both the RIPE's DNSMON and the h.root-servers.org site show this. How, in this day and age of network engineering, can we even entertain one of the thirteen root servers being unavailable for so long? I mean, the US army doesn't even seem to make the effort to deploy more sites. Look at the other root operators who don't have the backing of the US government money machine. Many of them seem to be able to deploy redundant instances. Even the much-maligned ICANN seems to have managed deploying 11 sites. All these root operators that have only one site need a good swift kick, or maybe they should pass the responsibility to others who are more committed to ensuring the Internet's stability."
Re:There are 12 others - pick one. (Score:1, Informative)
It's just one of 13 roots.
Actually, it's one out of over 200. There are only 13 IP addresses, but behind most of these addresses (anycast) there are multiple sites.
Re:There are 12 others - pick one. (Score:2, Informative)
Right at the beginning of the thread you fricken moron.
Re:Why is it their problem? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, most of the root "servers" are "anycast" now (9 of 13), so a single site failure doesn't matter. The US DoD runs two (G and H). G is anycast. H isn't. There wasn't clarification to what the issue was. It's easy to be quick to say "oh they suck", but shit happens sometimes. That's part of why we don't run on just one root nameserver. :)
For all we know, it could have been a planned outage. I kinda doubt it with that size window, but who knows. It was only 1 of 13, which makes it more like 1 of an awful lot since 9 of the "servers" are really servers distributed world wide. I was doing some monitoring a while back, showing how our traffic moved, and that included monitoring the root servers. It made some really screwy routes, where one check would be in the US, and the next one would be somewhere in Europe.
Re:Was it the monitoring system? (Score:5, Informative)
https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2010-October/006142.html
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE
> FYI, the H root server is currently experiencing an outage
> due to a SONET ring outage possibly caused by flooding from
> the tropical storm on the east coast. No estimated repair time.
H root returned to service at 12:30 UTC today. Fiber cut due to downed
utility poles. Repair was delayed due to high water.