Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 09:47:35 -0700 From: Mark Boolootian <booloo@ucsc.edu> Sender: owner-nanog@merit.edu
It might be a matter of interpretation. According to http://d.root-servers.org/october21.txt:
2.1. Some root name servers were unreachable from many parts of the global Internet due to congestion from the attack traffic delivered upstream/nearby. While all servers continued to answer all queries they received (due to successful overprovisioning of host resources), many valid queries were unable to reach some root name servers due to attack- related congestion effects, and thus went unanswered.
While I'm not trying to act as Sclavos' apologist, I think you have to be careful about how you respond to this particular claim of his. You can't dismiss it out-of-hand. Misleading? Yes. Flat out false? You'd have to be more convincing.
Sorry, Mark, but we can. The congestion did not take down 9 of 13 servers, which was Scalvos claim. It did severely impact ALL Internet traffic and traffic to/from DNS servers was a part of it. He did not say that some people could not resolve names. In fact, he says that they could. He is quoted as saying: "It should scare people that nine of the 13 went down." No equivocation in that statement. No accuracy, either. -- R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: oberman@es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634