.ORG problems this evening

Thu Sep 18 11:50:09 UTC 2003

On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Majdi S. Abbas wrote:

: 	I didn't have a problem with .org this evening, and I've asked
: around and others don't seem to have noticed anything either.  It would be
: more helpful if you told us your source prefix, and which filter you're
: hitting when you traceroute to tld[12].ultradns.net.

12  dellfweqab.ultradns.net (204.74.103.2)  24.811 ms !H

Same machine for both tld1 and tld2, seen through XO last night and Verio
this morning, from source prefix 66.56.64.0/19 (as well as two others, one
on the US east coast and one in US midwest which I cannot name publicly).

So as far as my machine's source address is concerned, even if the servers
are anycast, there are still only two servers which reside on a single point
of failure.  Anycasting doesn't help me one whit if there are only two
servers for my named to choose and both of the ones visible from my location
are down (even though their routes are up) -- this is IMNSHO irresponsible
for a gTLD operator.

If anycast is the game, there should be much more than just two addresses to
choose.  Ideally, there should be about six, and certain servers should
deliberately *not* advertise certain anycast networks, in an overlap mesh
that allows one point to fail while others still respond.  For instance:

USA server location A advertises networks 1, 3, 5;
USA server location B advertises networks 1, 3, 4;
Europe server location A advertises networks 3, 4, 6;
Asia server location A advertises networks 2, 5, 6;

or something to that effect.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv at duh.org> <tv at pobox.com>