At 10:32 AM 7/3/97 -0700, Rodney Joffe wrote: Yeah it is. Wait till someone steals your network numbers by broadcasting them and their ISP isn't filtering. It's Happened Before. This is one of the things we don't want the press writing about. How darned easy it is for some person making a silly mistake to introduce a big transient problem until it gets killed. Fortunately, people pay attention and kill these things off reasonably quickly, but it makes managing the net a much more "active" thing than one would think at first inspection. A lot of management at a lot of companies (even ISPs), doesn't realize this. The problem of course is that we can't scale the number of people who know how to fix things like this nearly as fast as we can (and are) scaling the network. The whole thing needs to be a lot more insensitive to minor screwups. The fact that most of our protocols (like especially DNS and even to an extent BGP) were designed when the universe of people who would be managing them was much smaller. The problem gets worse when people use old protocols (like DNS) that were intended for one thing (nameing) to implement something different (like load balancing) "because it works". Kind of. On the other hand, with the installed base, replacing old protocols is getting really difficult. As an industry, we need to move this process forward. The network grows while you sleep... -jcp- PS: Personal note: This is my last week at PointCast, hence the 'jcphome' address. That's my permanent address. -jcp-

This has been corrected temporarily. With brute force ;-)

Genieweb is a downstream customer of Los Nettos, one of our customers. No-one has been able to reach the company or the contact, so their T1 was just taken down. I expect a call rather soon, so we can get them to fix their mistake.

But it does bring up an interesting point.... is it that easy to create chaos? They are so far down the food chain, and yet....

Rodney Joffe Chief Technology Officer Genuity Inc., a Bechtel company http://www.genuity.net

...

-----Original Message----- From: seanl@literati.org [SMTP:seanl@literati.org] Sent: Thursday, July 03, 1997 9:59 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: genieweb.com answering for COM

com. 304 SOA genieweb.com. root.genieweb.com. ( 11 ; serial 10800 ; refresh (3 hours) 3600 ; retry (1 hour) 604800 ; expire (7 days)

This was cached on one our name servers. Sure enough, dig any com @genieweb.com shows:

;; ANSWERS: com. 86400 SOA genieweb.com. root.genieweb.com. ( 11 ; serial 10800 ; refresh (3 hours) 3600 ; retry (1 hour) 604800 ; expire (7 days) 86400 ) ; minimum (1 day) com. 86400 NS genieweb.com.

;; AUTHORITY RECORDS: com. 86400 NS genieweb.com.

;; ADDITIONAL RECORDS: genieweb.com. 86400 A 198.147.97.23

I wonder if this is what has been causing random COM domain lookups to fail for random people at random places.

The time I can see this affecting a name server is if it does a lookup for a domain that's lamely delegated to genieweb.com, and then caches the 'com' reply.

I've already left voicemail for the genieweb people.

-- Sean R. Lynch <seanl@literati.org>

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