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Army DNS ROOT Server Down For 18+ Hours
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."
The H-Root server does NOT run Windows, just in case anyone was wondering ;-)
On a more serious note, while the downtime is bad... there are 13 root servers owned by different organizations (both government & non-government) for a reason.. to provide redundancy. Interestingly, the D-Root at College Park and H-Root at Aberdeen are relatively close to one another geographically. The distributing the H-Root service would be nice, but there are lots of other letters to use in the Root namespace. In short: The Army should probably take some steps to beef things up, but the (usual) mouth-breathing hypersensationalized crap spewed in the summary is mostly for getting ad revenue into Taco's bank account and not a rational evaluation of the situation.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Most of us lived at least a large part of our lives without any root servers - or any servers at all. It's not the end of the world if DNS goes down. It will be ok, I promise.
You are an idiot.
At one time it wouldn't have been a disaster for DNS to go down. Now we have everything from business to business transactions to stock trading to government bonds to consumer purchases being done online. We have hospitals depending on the internet to get their plasma on time. We have a billion people using social networks for hours. We have farmers using the internet to check the weather, militaries using the internet to transmit vital intelligence, and kids using the internet to call home and say they'll be late.
From the small to the great the world is online now and even an hour's outage of the internet would be a disaster comparable in economic and social cost to the complete destruction of a small city somewhere in the world.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
How on Earth did you ever get modded insightful?
What do you think your ISPs DNS server uses to for the first step of resolving any query it doesn't have cached? Psychic powers? Magic fairy dust?
Having said that, the whole point of having multiple root DNS servers is to ensure the failure of one is nothing more than a minor irritation.