DNS Flag Day, Friday, Feb 1st, 2019

Thu Jan 31 16:42:09 UTC 2019

> On Jan 30, 2019, at 17:40 , Jim Popovitch via NANOG <nanog at nanog.org> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2019-01-30 at 17:22 -0800, Matthew Petach wrote:
>> Any chance this could wait until say the Tuesday 
>> *after* the Superbowl, when we aren't cutting an 
>> entire religion's worth of potential workers out of 
>> the workforce available to fix issues in case it 
>> turns out to be a bigger problem than is expected, 
>> and when we have less chance of annoying the 
>> vast army of football-loving fans of every sort? 
> 
> IIRC, DNS Flag Day was announce way before last years Super Bowl...
> what did the people who aren't ready for DNS Flag Day do in the past
> 364 days that they need a few more days to get ready for?
> 
> -Jim P.

Consider this…

Sometimes you are responsible for fielding the calls and explaining problems that occur on systems that aren’t entirely within your control.

A business class ISP, for example, would have a hard time proactively fixing all of their customer’s DNS resolvers and clients. Nonetheless, you can be assured that their call center will get the calls when the behavior of DNS changes in a way that negatively impacts some fraction of those clients.

In my estimation, the most likely impact of this event will be on the enterprise, not the ISP or residential communities.

The ISP community is either aware of and/or dealt with it in the normal course of business or they have had their head so deep in the sand that I don’t have much sympathy for what happens to them.

The residential end user doesn’t run name servers for the most part, so, unlikely to be much impact there. The ones that do (such as myself) are likely technical enough and likely sufficiently involved in the ISP community to have heard about this issue and taken appropriate action.

In my experience, enterprise IT, OTOH, is widely variable in its attentiveness to changes on the internet until after they have occurred. Network focused enterprises (e.g. Akamai, DropBox, etc.) are unlikely to be impacted. Other kinds of enterprises for whom the internet is more of a utility than a core function, OTOH, may have less awareness ahead of time (e.g. Chevron, GM, your local dive shop, the bodega on the corner, etc.).

The larger enterprises probably have someone paying some attention. I suspect most of the casualties in this event will be in the Small to Medium business community.

Owen