was i asleep when the gtld servers had the worse problem today?

Thu Nov 12 04:07:05 UTC 1998

On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, Paul A Vixie wrote:

> http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,28664,00.html?st.ne.fd.mdh
> 

As you well know, NSI are the ones who must have been asleep, just like
they have normally been for the past few years.  This article is so full
of crap that it goes far beyond the normal mistruths.  Worst of all, it
doesn't appear like it is just based on a reporter misinterpreting things,
but on NSI actually either lying or being incompetent enough to not have a
clue about what is going on.

I wonder why their f.gtld-servers.net was named f and if they are
deliberately trying to confuse the issue.  Last I knew there were a lot
more letters left in the alphabet.

I am not aware of having any problems because f.root-servers.net was lame,
but am very aware of having problems because of the gtld-servers.net being
broken, and at least one was broken for hours.

Interestingly, somehow Paul managed to my message in minutes with an
observation on how his server was functioning and I am certain that, if
his had been returning bogus negative answers, he would have fixed it just
as quickly.  I would expect (well, I wouldn't but in theory...) the
opposite: NSI taking action within minutes, while these unreliable
individuals perhaps taking more time.

When the VP of engineering for NSI is saying things like "it is difficult
to determine exactly what had been causing the sporadic outages" (not his
words, but quoted from the cnet article on what he said) and saying "the
Internet is a big organism" to try to explain why they don't have a clue,
it is obvious there is some serious incompetence or lack of communication
somewhere at NSI.

Ignoring all the political issues, it is becoming more and more clear that
NSI is technically incapable of dealing with the demands of doing what
they are supposed to do.

I'm certainly going to let the author of the cnet article know how I think
she was tricked by NSI's misstatements or lies.

Note that unlike the usual political crap, this is a real operational
issue that is based completely on technical issues.