On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, Paul A Vixie wrote:
http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,28664,00.html?st.ne.fd.mdh
As you well know, NSI are the ones who must have been asleep, just like they have normally been for the past few years. This article is so full of crap that it goes far beyond the normal mistruths. Worst of all, it doesn't appear like it is just based on a reporter misinterpreting things, but on NSI actually either lying or being incompetent enough to not have a clue about what is going on. I wonder why their f.gtld-servers.net was named f and if they are deliberately trying to confuse the issue. Last I knew there were a lot more letters left in the alphabet. I am not aware of having any problems because f.root-servers.net was lame, but am very aware of having problems because of the gtld-servers.net being broken, and at least one was broken for hours. Interestingly, somehow Paul managed to my message in minutes with an observation on how his server was functioning and I am certain that, if his had been returning bogus negative answers, he would have fixed it just as quickly. I would expect (well, I wouldn't but in theory...) the opposite: NSI taking action within minutes, while these unreliable individuals perhaps taking more time. When the VP of engineering for NSI is saying things like "it is difficult to determine exactly what had been causing the sporadic outages" (not his words, but quoted from the cnet article on what he said) and saying "the Internet is a big organism" to try to explain why they don't have a clue, it is obvious there is some serious incompetence or lack of communication somewhere at NSI. Ignoring all the political issues, it is becoming more and more clear that NSI is technically incapable of dealing with the demands of doing what they are supposed to do. I'm certainly going to let the author of the cnet article know how I think she was tricked by NSI's misstatements or lies. Note that unlike the usual political crap, this is a real operational issue that is based completely on technical issues.