wikimedia dns issue

Matthew Walker mwalker at wikimedia.org
Wed Nov 27 00:17:00 UTC 2013


Randy,

Thanks for the concern -- if I understand your email correct the issue is
not that you cannot resolve donate.wikimedia.org; but it's that one of our
subdomains resolves to something that's not a WMF server?

If so; the behavior you're seeing, that links.email.donate.wikimedia.org goes
to ?.mkt41.net is correct. What we're doing is year is using an external
bulk mailer to try and ensure deliverability of fundraising mail (it turns
out that we get about $1 per email so getting good deliverability is pretty
important.) The bulk mailer, Silverpop, does link rewriting in the body of
the email for use statistical things (we A/B test our emails and use their
dashboards to do so).

For what its worth our donor rights policy [1] applies to this type of data.

[1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donor_policy

~Matt Walker
Wikimedia Foundation
Fundraising Technology Team


On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 3:44 PM, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:

> leslie, you out there?
>
> ryuu.psg.com:/Users/randy> host links.email.donate.wikimedia.org.
> links.email.donate.wikimedia.org is an alias for recp.mkt41.net.
> recp.mkt41.net has address 74.121.50.40
>
>    $ dscacheutil -flushcache
>
> does not clear it
>
> this is all in tokyo.  so i ssh into a server in seattle westin.
>
>     psg.com:/usr/home/randy> host links.email.donate.wikimedia.org.
>     links.email.donate.wikimedia.org is an alias for recp.mkt41.net.
>     recp.mkt41.net has address 74.121.50.40
>
> the real or unreal CNAME RR is pretty prevalent
>
> pretoria
>
>     root at afnog:~ # host links.email.donate.wikimedia.org.
>     links.email.donate.wikimedia.org is an alias for recp.mkt41.net.
>     recp.mkt41.net has address 74.121.50.40
>
> london starts to scare me
>
>     drinx.linx.net:/root# host links.email.donate.wikimedia.org.
>     ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
>     drinx.linx.net:/root# host links.email.donate.wikimedia.org.
>     ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
>
> so i look at the nearest zone i can find
>
>     ryuu.psg.com:/Users/randy> doc -p -w donate.wikimedia.org.
>     Doc-2.2.3: doc -p -w donate.wikimedia.org.
>     Doc-2.2.3: Starting test of donate.wikimedia.org.   parent is
> wikimedia.org.
>     Doc-2.2.3: Test date - Tue Nov 26 10:46:48 JST 2013
>     SYSerr: No servers for donate.wikimedia.org. returned SOAs ...
>     Summary:
>        YIKES: doc aborted while testing donate.wikimedia.org.  parent
> wikimedia.org.
>        Incomplete test for donate.wikimedia.org. (1)
>     Done testing donate.wikimedia.org.  Tue Nov 26 10:46:49 JST 2013
>
> at least the parent is ok
>
>     ryuu.psg.com:/Users/randy> doc -p -w wikimedia.org.
>     Doc-2.2.3: doc -p -w wikimedia.org.
>     Doc-2.2.3: Starting test of wikimedia.org.   parent is org.
>     Doc-2.2.3: Test date - Tue Nov 26 10:47:45 JST 2013
>     Summary:
>        No errors or warnings issued for wikimedia.org.
>     Done testing wikimedia.org.  Tue Nov 26 10:47:48 JST 2013
>
> aha!
>
>     ryuu.psg.com:/Users/randy> ns donate.wikimedia.org.
>     donate-lb.eqiad.wikimedia.org.
>
> i suspect a load balancer
>
> yes, i reported this to wikimedia two days ago.  a response, then black
> hole.  problem persists.
>
> randy
>
>



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