China Telecom filtering nameservers

Wed Oct 22 19:30:20 UTC 2003

On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 02:57:55PM -0400, Daniel Medina wrote:
>  Our main nameservers are being filtered from networks managed by
> 
> 	CHINANET, Data Communications Division, 
> 	China Telecom
> 
> All traffic from our nameservers (ICMP, DNS queries, etc) is being
> dropped.  As a result, many websites and mail servers with DNS hosted on

This has been seen elsewhere too and contacting someone at chinanet
has been difficult.  Your DNS may be filtered if it supports recursive
lookups from chinanet.  Forgetting for a moment the potential problems
with doing that, its been suggested that chinanet is filtering DNS as a
means to prevent their users from pointing at your DNS to get to sites
that they may deem inappropriate (censorship).

>  Does anyone know of any good contacts at China Telecom, or know if 
> there's some explanation for this?

This is a problem.  If you have someone on staff that can speak
Chinese, that might be useful.  I haven't heard of email to the public
addresses resulting in any meaningful response.  I can't point to a
specific contact at the moment, but I have been peripherally involved in
this problem and if something definitively useful comes out of it I can
follow up with you in private email.

John