North American Network Operators Group

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Re: OT: totalnic.net?

  • From: Andy Brezinsky
  • Date: Sun Nov 18 22:03:51 2001

Here's what totalnic had to say about the outage:
-------------------------------------
Following is information on the recent  DNS outage.

The duration of this outage was approximately 36 hours commencing around 6 AM 
US Mountain Time (8 AM US Eastern Time/1 PM GMT). Many domain names were 
impacted including quite a few belonging to TotalNIC.net customers, including 
the TotalNIC.net domain itself.

The TotalNIC customer service and engineering taskforce became aware of this 
problem and worked aggressively to resolve this in conjunction with staff of 
the central registry operator.  At first we were advised by the registry that 
the problem would be resolved within approximately 6 hours (8 PM US Eastern 
Nov. 17, 2001/1 AM GMT Nov. 18,2001).  Unfortunately this was not to be the 
case - the problem was only partially resolved and, for those names not fixed 
at that time, the outage escalated.  Our staff monitored the situation and 
put into place a second strategy for resolving the problem when it became 
evident that the registry's strategy had failed to adequately resolve the 
outage.  Because of the size of the COM/NET/ORG DNS zonefiles it takes the 
registry over 8 hours to generate and make this data available to the 
Internet - this means that any issues in relation to those data files can 
take a significant period of time to rectify.

To our knowledge, this situation was completely rectified by 8 PM US Eastern 
Nov. 18, 2001/1 AM GMT Nov. 19,2001.

During the emergency fix that was put into place by our staff on the 18th, we 
intentionally bypassed our own site's WHOIS and domain management tools for 
the impacted domain names. While we understand that this caused additional 
concern, we felt that this inconvenience was in our customer's best interest 
in resolving the DNS issues.
Full service on the TotalNIC.net site was returned at 4 PM Eastern US/7 PM 
GMT on Nov. 19, 2001.

We do understand the serious impact that this has had on you when you are 
relying upon your domain name service being maintained. Whilst this situation 
could have affected customers of any registrar we are deeply concerned that 
this impacted TotalNIC.net customers. We have worked with all of the parties 
involved to ensure that outages like this cannot occur in the future.

TotalNIC apologizes profusely for the inconvenience caused and any loss you 
may have occasioned as a consequence of this outage.

Please note that in an unrelated issue, the phone lines at our US offices 
were temporarily shorted out. This caused what sounded like hang-ups to many 
customers attempting to contact our updated service status message. 
TotalNIC.net staff worked with local phone providers to resolve this issue. 
This was completed by 2 PM Eastern US time, Nov. 19, 2001.

We do encourage you to contact us if you have any further queries in relation 
to this matter.

Thank you for your understanding and for your continued support.

-- 
Vincent S. Hamm
Director American OperationsCapital Networks/TotalNICThank you for using 
http://icann.TotalNIC.net the original half-price domain registrar.


On Friday 16 November 2001 02:00 pm, Mike Lewinski wrote:
> Anyone know what's up with Registrar services from totalnic.net (AU)? We
> had a client register a domain with them a couple days ago. That new
> domain was working yesterday, but has since disappeared from the gtld
> root servers.
>
> The domain totalnic.net is itself missing from gtld roots (whois shows
> their own domain is paid through 2010).
>
> So, if a given Registrar were suffering a complete loss of connectivity,
> would that affect their entries at the gtld roots? Or is this more
> likely a result of some type of dispute/unpaid bills with ICANN?
>
> TIA,
>
> Mike