On 26 Oct 2006, Paul Vixie wrote:
I'm seeing *.register.com down (including ns*) from everywhere.
They are apparently under a multi-gbps ddos of "biblical proportions".
i wonder if that's due to the spam they've been sending out?
As pointed out by Rob Seastrom in private email, RFC2182 addresses things of biblical proportions -
no. really, not.
such as dispersion of nameservers geographically and topologically. Having 3 secondaries, only one of them on separate /24, and none of them on topologically different network does not qualify.
there is no zone anywhere, including COM, the root zone, or any other, that is immune from worst-case DDoS. anycast all you want. diversify. build a name service infrastructure larger than the earth's moon. none of that will matter as long as OPNs (the scourge of internet robustness) still exist. This isn't 2001, and, I will argue that it *is*, in fact, possible to be
Paul, this isn't nanae. Let's not sling accusations like that wildly. protected from a "worst case" ddos, and not at obscene price. However, even if you argue that point, there's no excuse for not being prepared at all, and not following the BCP. While we all may be guilty of not having topologically/geographically diverse DNS - for someone whose core business is DNS, that's unexcusable.
Given that register.com is/was public (I think?) - I wonder what are their sarbox auditors saying about it now ;)
that's an easy but catty criticism, and baseless. i'm sure that some way could be found to improve register.com's infrastructure, and i don't just mean by stopping the spamming they've been doing. but it's not trivial and in the face of well-tuned worst-case DDoS, nothing will help. Well, let's talk about "worst-case ddos". Let's say, 50mpps (I have not heard of ddos larger that that number). Let's say, you can sink/filter 100kpps on each box (not unreasonable on higher-end box with nsd). That means, you should be able to filter this attack with ~500 servers, appropriately place. Say, because you don't know where the attack will come in, you need 4 times more the estimated number of servers, that's 2000 servers. That's not entirely unreasonable number for a large enough company.
I know that the above was just rough back-of-the-envelope, and things are far more complicated than that, but this discussion does not really belong to nanog-l.
Compliance of icann-accredited gtld-registrars with rfc2182 might be a good subject for research (again, thanks to rs for idea).... i've been wondering if ICANN's accredidation could be revoked for spammers, and register.com has indeed been spamming. and it may also be that they are out of compliance with RFC 2182. but that would be like catching al capone for income tax evasion just because you couldn't pin murder on him. Things like that, and accusations like that, I don't think really belong to nanog-l.
(speaking for myself only)