Facebook post-mortems...

Tue Oct 5 13:04:07 UTC 2021

On Tue, Oct 05, 2021 at 02:57:42PM +0200, Mark Tinka wrote:
> 
> 
> On 10/5/21 14:52, Joe Greco wrote:
> 
> >That's not quite true.  It still gives much better clue as to what is
> >going on; if a host resolves to an IP but isn't pingable/traceroutable,
> >that is something that many more techy people will understand than if
> >the domain is simply unresolvable.  Not everyone has the skill set and
> >knowledge of DNS to understand how to track down what nameservers
> >Facebook is supposed to have, and how to debug names not resolving.
> >There are lots of helpdesk people who are not expert in every topic.
> >
> >Having DNS doesn't magically get you service back, of course, but it
> >leaves a better story behind than simply vanishing from the network.
> 
> That's great for you and me who believe in and like troubleshooting.
> 
> Jane and Thando who just want their Instagram timeline feed couldn't 
> care less about DNS working but network access is down. To them, it's 
> broken, despite your state-of-the-art global DNS architecture.

You don't think at least 10,000 helpdesk requests about Facebook being
down were sent yesterday?

There's something to be said for building these things to be resilient
in a manner that isn't just convenient internally, but also externally
to those people that network operators sometimes forget also support
their network issues indirectly.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way
through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that
democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"-Asimov