Weird DNS issues for domains

Thu Sep 29 20:28:35 UTC 2005

Matthew Crocker <matthew at crocker.com> writes:

> Yeah, yeah,  that is overrated.  If my site goes dark and my DNS goes
> down it doesn't really matter as the bandwidth and the web server
> will also be down.  Having a live DNS server in another part of the
> country won't help if the access routers handling the traffic for the
> T1 to the school is also down.
>
> Geographically diverse name servers sounds great in theory but for
> this application it won't gain any redundancy.

Whether you consider "traceroute works and I can see the packets fall
off the map at $LOCATION" better than a nameserver timeout is I
suppose a matter of personal taste.

In any event, it's my personal opinion that even if the nameservers
aren't in the same building ("geographically diverse" per the RFC)
that same prefix or even same origin AS represents a step away from
goodness.  In fact, what you're seeing right now *just might* be due
to some kind of routing nastiness.  The failure mode would be much
easier to talk some enduser through debugging if the domain name at
least resolved.

Me, I have nameservers in Ashburn and Palo Alto, with additional ones
coming online in London and Montreal (and maybe Tokyo) one of these
years as time permits.

Your mileage may vary, naturally; as you can see from this photograph,
I really *am* a belt-and-suspenders sort of guy:
http://www.seastrom.com/seips20030927-shooting.jpg

                                        ---Rob