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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."
Then think more rationally. What is the cost of a missed email? How about a thousand of them? If one non-spam email in 10,000 contains an urgent piece of information what's the cost of missing an hour's worth? How about purchases? What if every internet based store, currency trading mechanism, bond exchange and commodity exchange lost an hour's income? How much the cost of 1 billion missed "I know you're there and I support you" connections between friends? How much the cost of 1,000 drivers that can't contact a tow truck, 100,000 telecommuters that can't sign in to work, 1,000,000 phone calls that don't happen, and 10,000,000 attempts to do some bit of research that fail? A million businesses that can't get int touch with a million others?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
What went wrong is that a server that's not supposed to ever go down went down. What went wrong is that there are a number of well-established redundancy schemes that are capable of preventing such an outage. What went wrong is that somebody at the Army who ran this server didn't use a single one of them or didn't do it correctly. So yeah, they acted stupidly. Go ahead and rub your nose in it until you get over your "how DARE you claim incompetence within the Army" offense. I'll wait.
I don't follow your logic. We don't want US to control the internet "for free". We don't want US to control the government AT ALL. But if they don't want to give up their control, they could at least try to be somewhat competent at it.
Step 1: People say "US Gov/Military shouldn't control the internet". Step 2: US Gov/Military fucks something up.
By what logic should people not point fingers?
Because they don't have redundancy?
What do you mean they don't have redundancy? Last time I checked there were something like 13 root servers. The entire purpose of having multiple root servers is to keep the internet up when one or even a few go down.
There's no place like