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."

Comments

So the Internet worked as it should...

[Anonymous Coward]

So the Internet worked as it should, and routed around this disruption. The other root servers were unaffected, and still functioned fine. So what exactly is the problem?

There are 12 others - pick one.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardware fails. That's just how it is. Even with the highest end hardware available today, outages can happen. This is why there are 13 root servers to start with. So long as they don't all go down at once, all is good. As far as 18 hours to recover, why is that bad? With 12 others to pick from, should this one be a high priority? I think not. Getting one's panties in a bunch because a server fails and takes some time to recover makes you sound like a silly management type. 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.

Re:There are 12 others - pick one.

[forkazoo]

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.

Meh. It's just one of 13 roots. Almost nobody queries it directly. If I have my DNS pointing to my ISP DNS, or to Google DNS, or to my own recursive caching DNS Server which uses one of those as an upstream, all 13 root servers could be down for literally days and it's likely that almost nobody would ever notice. Most DNS servers will retain large caches of most domains. If something freaks out when the roots disappear, a few small ISP's might need to make some quick configuration changes. Some DNS changes wouldn' propagate properly until the DNS root servers were back online. But, frankly, life would go on. Making all of DNS go away would be pretty much impossible, short of taking out every node on the Internet.

Yes, if *All 13* root servers suddenly died, there would be a few people who would get a late night at the office, but I certainly wouldn't see the effects directly.

Re:Was it the monitoring system?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.