On 1/6/06 9:54 PM, "Steve Gibbard" <scg@gibbard.org> wrote:
On Fri, 6 Jan 2006, william(at)elan.net wrote:
On Fri, 6 Jan 2006, Wil Schultz wrote:
Apparently they have lost two authoritative servers. ETA is unknown.
You forgot to mention that they only have two authoritative servers for most of their domains...
[snip]
So from my uninformed vantage point, it looks like they started doing this more or less right -- two servers or clusters of servers in two different facilities, a few thousand miles apart on different power grids and not subject to the same natural disasters. In other words, they did the hard part. What they didn't do is put them in different BGP routes, which for a network with as much IP space as Qwest has would seem fairly easy. While it's tempting to make fun of Qwest here, variations on this theme -- working hard on one area of design while ignoring another that's also critical -- are really common. It's something we all need to be careful of.
Or, not having seen what happened here, the problem could have been something completely different, perhaps even having nothing to do with routing or network topology. In that case, my general point would remain the same, but this would be a bad example to use.
-Steve
At some point in a carrier's growth, Anycast DNS has got to become a best practice. Are there many major carriers that don't do it today, or am I just a starry-eyed idealist? - Dan