Microsoft.com is again responding here. I had to point this out. On the main page (www.microsoft.com) under Today's News (which conveniently makes no mention of the fact that they've been offline for a day) They have this headline for a story, "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer explains how Microsoft software provides the business agility that customers need to stay ahead." Can you say irony? I bet Steve Ballmer can... --Tim ============================================= Timothy M. Wolfe CCNA, NSA Sr. Security Engineer tim@ignw.com InfoGroup Northwest 541.485.0957 x108 ============================================= -----Original Message----- From: woods@weird.com [mailto:woods@weird.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2001 3:01 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: RE: Microsoft spokesperson blames ICANN [ On Wednesday, January 24, 2001 at 13:09:45 (-0800), Roeland Meyer wrote: ]

Subject: RE: Microsoft spokesperson blames ICANN

From our efforts, it is not at all surprising that someone, at MSFT, munged the DNS configuration, totally. Even their best guru could have done it, due to the murky nature of the config. I suspect that there are less than 100 ppl that could even have a clue, in this area, and they don't all have the same pieces of clue.

That's absolutely idiotic (of M$, that is !;-). Even more idiotic than putting all their nameservers in one basket, so to speak. I'd bet any high-school kid who had any experience whatsoever at installing Linux or FreeBSD could no doubt blow a real OS and a native BIND install onto any sufficiently capable set of four machines in about an hour or so and provided that someone could cough up at least a half-baked zone file from somewhere to load on them they'd all be online and answering to the registered nameserver IP numbers in no time flat. Certainly in less than what's apparently going to be at least 23 hours now! Heck I know a half dozen or more people around the world who would have put their dislike of M$ away for a short period and loaded a zone file or two on their own nameservers for M$ if only M$ could have managed to get the .COM zone updated with new delegations.... What ever happened in this community to asking the community for help when you're caught between a rock and a hard place? (Not that a company the size of M$ should have to ask for a handout -- they no doubt have significant IP connectivity in as many places around the world as almost anyone else!) MS has nothing and no-one to blame but their own stupidity and arrogance in this. Meanwhile they're so damn big and "important" to so many users that this outage is having both a direct and an indirect negative impact on a lot of ISPs around the world! "Hey! The Internet must be broken if I can't get to M$.COM!"

What's needed is for some(one/group) that has a though understanding of both systems, at the design level, to sort out the bits. This is properly, a development project, one that most system admins are unsuited for. Unfortunately, it is left at the system admin level, IMHO.

No, what's needed is for M$ to learn that they need to deploy software that's capable of the task even if it didn't come from a box and doesn't have their logo branded on it. Squishing things together that were never meant to be squished together is only going to cause a big mess. Err, has already caused a big mess, at least for M$ and those who deal with them! ;-) They'd also do well to learn a bit about network geography and just exactly how authoritative nameserver visibility from various locations on this wonderful Internet of ours can directly affect their bottom line! -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP <gwoods@acm.org> <robohack!woods> Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com> PS: they're still down for the count from this neck of the woods! Interestingly one of them's completely unreachable from here now... $ host -C microsoft.com microsoft.com NS DNS4.CP.MSFT.NET Nameserver DNS4.CP.MSFT.NET not responding microsoft.com SOA record not found at DNS4.CP.MSFT.NET, try again microsoft.com NS DNS5.CP.MSFT.NET Nameserver DNS5.CP.MSFT.NET not responding microsoft.com SOA record not found at DNS5.CP.MSFT.NET, try again microsoft.com NS DNS7.CP.MSFT.NET Nameserver DNS7.CP.MSFT.NET not responding microsoft.com SOA record not found at DNS7.CP.MSFT.NET, try again microsoft.com NS DNS6.CP.MSFT.NET Nameserver DNS6.CP.MSFT.NET not reachable microsoft.com SOA record not found at DNS6.CP.MSFT.NET, try again