NSI bulletin 097-004 | Root Server Problems

Thu Jul 17 19:14:41 UTC 1997

At 11:14 AM 07/17/97 PDT, Randy Bush wrote:
>> Despite alarms raised by Network Solutions' quality assurance schemes, at
>> approximately 2:30 a.m. (Eastern Time), a system administrator released
>> the zone file without regenerating the file and verifying its integrity.
>
>You allow mere humans to affect the process on which the whole net relies?
>Oh my gawd!  I demand my money back!  :-)
>
>But seriously.  Thanks for the explanation, David.  These things happen,
>though rarely, one hopes.  We all kinda wonder, but don't want to add to
>the problem by calling, whining, ...
>
>Shall we have a gaffe of the week contest, this week's major entries being
>this one and probably MAE-West/MFS?  We could call it the Metcalf award.
>But, David, please don't emulate the competiton by doing it twice. :-)

Well, what would make it tough is if there were a gaffe of the month
contest, because that would be NSI competing with itself.  Recall that
problem of a couple of weeks ago where NSI fiddled with its FTP access
permissions and made it impossible for the root servers to obtain the root
file ... a mistake that, like this one, was detected first by persons
outside of NSI, and only hours later did NSI make any public
acknowledgement of the mistake.