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Re: Spain was offline

  • From: Peter Corlett
  • Date: Thu Aug 31 12:33:05 2006


On 31 Aug 2006, at 16:30, Joseph Jackson wrote:
I wish the article had more info since I have been wondering how a
software upgrade downed the entire zone.

Oh, loads of ways.


Wasn't there any backup servers?

Well, a quick poke suggests, assuming a reasonably traditional setup, that ns1.nic.es is the master, and there are various slaves, not necessarily directly under their control. ns1.nic.es appears to be running BIND 9.3.2, and there's other versions running on the other nameservers. So if it *was* a software update of BIND, it's probably not global.


OTOH, I can believe that somebody broke a Perl script critical to it and it rolled out a valid, but empty, zonefile which the secondaries faithfully replicated. Not that I've watched cascading DNS failures at too many places with bits of crufty Perl, oh no...

Actually, it amazes me that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often.

Did they not test the upgrade before hand?  I know I'd lose my
job if I upgraded our dns servers all at once with out testing.

It's Europe, it's harder to fire people. There's probably a bit of scapegoating and shooting of messengers going on, but it's quite likely that the root cause is a general process failure that's not attributable to a single individual.