ServerBeach Name Server Outage?

Jon Kibler Jon.Kibler at aset.com
Mon Aug 10 11:06:17 UTC 2009


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Tim Franklin wrote:
>> Is anyone else that uses ServerBeach hosting having issues with their name
>> servers (ns[12].geodns.net) failing to resolve their hostnames?
> 
> I haven't seen any recent problems, although I have the geodns servers slaving
> from my server.  Are you doing the same, or generating DNS directly on their NS
> (through the web front end)?
> 
> Regards,
> Tim.
> 

I am being lazy and using their servers directly.

The problem has gone away. SB got back to me about 30 minutes after I opened a
trouble ticket through my.sb and said, "At around 0930 this morning our DNS
servers, ns1.geodns.com and ns2.geodns.com experienced an issue where name
resolution was not completing. We have not as of yet identified the root cause
of the issue, but services were restored shortly thereafter at around 0940. At
this time, we would like to ask that you please check your services again to
ensure that all is in order. If they are not, please do let us know and we will
investigate further."

I strongly disagree with their time frame estimates, as I saw an outage that
lasted at least 55 to 60 minutes, not 10 minutes. I first observed the outage
about 09:50 EDT, spent about 20 minutes investigating it and trying to verify it
was not a routing issue (I checked from 9 different locations that I could not
get name resolution), and another 10 minutes tracking down my password and
reporting it -- at 10:20. Name services were still failing at 10:45, but were
working correctly at 10:50 when I received the above message from SB.

To me, it looks like that SB has a *CRITICAL* infrastructure design problem if
they have a situation were both name servers can fail simultaneously. I hope
this does not mean that they have a single dual-homed box that is really both
name servers!! I would really want/expect them to have two physically different
servers in two vastly diverse physical locations (or even better, multiple boxes
hidden by anycast), but the type of failure observed tends to argue against such
diversity.

I hope this is a situation that SB will correct, as it is simply unacceptable to
have all of one's name servers simultaneously fail.

Jon K
- --
Jon R. Kibler
Chief Technical Officer
Advanced Systems Engineering Technology, Inc.
Charleston, SC  USA
o: 843-849-8214
c: 843-813-2924	(NEW!)
s: 843-564-4224
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jonrkibler

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