Todd Vierling wrote:
tld[12].ultradns.net, the NS for .ORG, was completely unreachable for about an hour or two this evening, timing out on all DNS queries. Anyone else see similar? (The hosts are unpingable and untracerouteable, so I had to use DNS queries to determine when they were back up.)
At any given moment, UltraDNS (and I am sure other root and tld servers) are under attack somewhere from someone. Additionally the monitors that test each of the anycast nodes reported no outages. Neither did the useful monitors that Rob Thomas runs at (http://www.cymru.com/DNS/gtlddns-o.html) Nor did the many "helpful" customers who use UltraDNS, and who run constant tests to each individual anycast node in search of an SLA event that may provide a service credit. ;-) Perhaps you had a network problem internally?
It makes me wonder how UltraDNS got a contract to manage the domain on all of two nameservers hosted on the same subnet, given that they were supposed to have deployed "geographically diverse" (or something like that) servers.
Fortunately ICANN and the other decision makers were actually network clueful, and could tell that 204.74.112.1 and 204.74.113.1 are actually different subnets ;-) As an aside, using ping or traceroute at *any* time to see if dns servers are working is not a great idea. -- Rodney Joffe Speaking on behalf of no-one other himself.