Re: Local root zone (Was NYTimes: Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for Internet)

Wed Feb 16 23:34:17 UTC 2011

On 2/16/11 6:10 PM, Steven Bellovin wrote:
>
> On Feb 16, 2011, at 4:25 13PM, Fred Baker wrote:
>
>> I don't think that the Egyptian shutdown of domain names had much effect; that's why the bgp prefixes were withdrawn. What was effective was the withdrawal of BGP prefixes.
>
> Per the NYT article, the issue was the Egyptian "Intranet" -- people couldn't contact other sites within Egypt by host name, even though the routes were up, because they couldn't resolve .eg, .com, etc.

i'll have to check if the .eg servers were ever taken off-line.

resolution of .com (beyond local caches) would have been pointless 
post-prefix withdrawal, but if the claim is that local ix routing 
remained possible, so non-cached .eg resolution was successful from 
outside of the eun to any other egyptian provider net, then if there 
is data to support the claim, it will be interesting. i'll ask.

-e