On Tue, Oct 05, 2021 at 03:40:39PM +0200, Mark Tinka wrote:
Yes, total nightmare yesterday, but sure that 9,999 of the helpdesk tickets had nothing to do with DNS. They likely all were - "Your Internet is down, just fix it; we don't wanna know".
Unrealistic user expectations are not the point. Users can demand whatever unrealistic claptrap they wish to. The point is that there are a lot of helpdesk staff at a lot of organizations who are responsible for responding to these issues. When Facebook or Microsoft or Amazon take a dump, you get a storm of requests. This is a storm of requests not just to one helpdesk, but to MANY helpdesks, across a wide number of organizations, and this means that you have thousands of people trying to investigate what has happened. It is very common for large companies to forget (or not care) that their technical failures impact not just their users, but also external support organizations. I totally get your disdain and indifference towards end users in these instances; for the average end user, yes, it indeed makes no difference if DNS works or not. However, some of those end users do have a point of contact up the chain. This could be their ISP support, or a company helpdesk, and most of these are tasked with taking an issue like this to some sort of resolution. What I'm talking about here is that it is easier to debug and make a determination that there is an IP connectivity issue when DNS works. If DNS isn't working, then you get into a bunch of stuff where you need to do things like determine if maybe it is some sort of DNSSEC issue, or other arcane and obscure issues, which tends to be beyond what front line helpdesk is capable of. These issues often cost companies real time and money to figure out. It is unlikely that Facebook is going to compensate them for this, so this brings me back around to the point that it's preferable to have DNS working when you have a BGP problem, because this is ultimately easier for people to test and reach a reasonable determination that the problem is on Facebook's side quickly and easily. ... 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