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Millions of .de Domains Unreachable For Hours
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."
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?
Problems with the root .de name server. Of course, it's funnier if you don't know that "die" is "the" in german: "die die Rootserver für die Top-Level-Domain .de" so in germglish it becomes "die, die, tld .de rootserver" OMG terrorist threat!
Unicode on slashdot? UNPOSSIBLE
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.
Meanwhile I'm sure Hitler will be happy to discuss the situation on youtube.
Here is the response I found on the denic.de site : http://www.denic.de/typo3temp/pics/i_64bbbffdb3.jpg
According to my informations (DFN NOC) the problems resulted from a botched experiment with DNSSEC. Unluckily the DE-NIC is still silent about the incident.
Also, "GAU" is probably better translated as "worst-case scenario".
Once upon a time, the DE-NIC was very respected in the german internet community. But several things happened lately, that let the trust erode. There were internal power struggles, the rising influence of domain traders inside the DE-NIC and the surprising distribution of the two-letter-domain-rush (25% of all domains ending in the hands of a single person). Perhaps this outage will be a wakeup call. If we only count the time spent on customers calling the hotline, the damage for my company is several thousand dollars.
CU, Martin
Lufthansa (in German): "Ground, what is our start clearance time?"
Ground (in English): "If you want an answer you must speak in English."
Lufthansa (in English): "I am a German, flying a German airplane, in Germany. Why must I speak English?"
Unknown voice from another plane (in a beautiful British accent): "Because you lost the bloody war."
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Actually, we reserve the term "Super-GAU" for that. "GAU" translates to "most severe expected accident"; it's still something you design your facility to handle. Consequently, a Super-GAU is an accident that exceeds what you planned for. An important point is that nuclear plants are required not to emit any radioactive material even in case of a GAU. Therefore, any accident during which the plant does release radioactive material is a Super-GAU.
Three Mile Island is a good example: Back than it was a Super-GAU as nobody designed reactors to handle gas buildup. With modern reactors it's a regular a GAU since modern designs are required to consider that failure mode and mitigate it.
In short: A GAU is "well, I guess after we're done decontamining and repairing the plant we'll need to do quite a bit of lobbying to get it back online". A Super-GAU is "we just contaminated how much land?".
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Looks like they put a DMCA takedown notice on the entire country.
True. The engineering term for a GAU is "Auslegungsstörfall" - you gotta love German composita. It roughly translates to "design basis accident" - the biggest accident covered by you fail-safes. The "GAU" acronym is mostly misused these days.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
.de nile of service!