apathy (was Re: .ORG problems this evening)

Fri Sep 19 16:48:20 UTC 2003

Todd Vierling wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 19 Sep 2003, Alex Bligh wrote:
> 
> : > DNS site A goes down, but its BGP advertisements are still in effect.
> : > (Their firewall still appears to be up, but DNS requests fail.)  Host
> : > site C cannot resolve ANYTHING from DNS site A, even though DNS site B is
> : > still up and running.  But host site C cannot see DNS site B!
> :
> : What you seem to be missing is that the BGP advert goes away when the DNS
> : requests stop working.
> 
> It didn't.  That's the problem.
> 
> I've repeatedly described how I do understand the methodology here.  What's
> being expressed on this list is blind faith and trust in an anycast-only
> gTLD DNS scheme that has the possibility of routing to a single point of
> failure.
> 
> This scheme has already failed once.  ("When will it fail again?")
> 
> Established gTLD practice has not put trust in an anycast routing scheme
> where one (1) destination might serve all queries for a host.  What I've
> tried to express is that the years-established, standard DNS redundancy
> failover model could and should be implemented to complement -- not replace
> -- this anycast model for something as critical as a Big Three gTLD.
> 
> That's fine; I give up due to pervasive community apathy.  When this happens
> again, I'll be sure to bring up the archive URL to the head of this thread.
> 
> <sigh>

You started from a point of having no idea that UltraDNS used anycast,
confirmed for everyone in your second email that you had no clue about
how anycast worked, and migrated by your third email to being an expert
on how it should work. And based on assumptions that were flawed in the
very beginning, you've created a one megabyte thread and a s+n/n ration
almost unparalleled by anything I've ever seen on NANOG before. As I
told you privately, I'm working on a response that tries to deal with
all the misinformation you've spouted. There is so much, however, that
it is taking more than the 10 minutes you took to decide you knew it
all.

So you can call it apathy, or anything else you want. It seems
consistent with your way of jumping to conclusions based on flawed
assumptions. But it's really just that other people actually take time
to research issues before mouthing off.

YMMV, and apparently it does.

In the interim, feel free to post your operational experience and
qualification with tlds and their dns.
-- 
Rodney Joffe
CenterGate Research Group, LLC.
http://www.centergate.com
"Technology so advanced, even we don't understand it!"(R)