Many of the programs at my company were broken all morning, until we found the problem. A lot of the programs we run were trying to get IP addresses from NetBIOS names in Windows, but Windows managed to find hostname.companyname.com. Until now, that had failed and the computer had given up on DNS and gone to the IP address of the computer with that NetBIOS name (the expected result). For that entire morning, all our requests to license managers, database servers, file servers, etc. were timing out and dying.
Also, our ERP package was completely dead for the duration: several hours in which our accounting people couldn't get any work done. I think we'd have a foot to stand on in court if we wanted to sue them for that one. Of course the damages weren't big enough to really make it worth it, but it's just another example of the kinds of things you can screw up by going out and doing this crap.
Personally, I've already added "route add -host 64.94.110.11 reject" to my startup scripts on all my Linux boxes. It won't give me the invalid domain errors back, but at least I won't have to wait for their server to time out before I get my error message.
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Many of the programs at my company were broken all morning, until we found the problem. A lot of the programs we run were trying to get IP addresses from NetBIOS names in Windows, but Windows managed to find hostname.companyname.com. Until now, that had failed and the computer had given up on DNS and gone to the IP address of the computer with that NetBIOS name (the expected result). For that entire morning, all our requests to license managers, database servers, file servers, etc. were timing out and dying.
Also, our ERP package was completely dead for the duration: several hours in which our accounting people couldn't get any work done. I think we'd have a foot to stand on in court if we wanted to sue them for that one. Of course the damages weren't big enough to really make it worth it, but it's just another example of the kinds of things you can screw up by going out and doing this crap.
Personally, I've already added "route add -host 64.94.110.11 reject" to my startup scripts on all my Linux boxes. It won't give me the invalid domain errors back, but at least I won't have to wait for their server to time out before I get my error message.
--Sablewing