Missing dot sends Sweden tumbling off internet Sweden effectively fell off the internet last night when maintenance to Domain Name Systems damaged every single .se web address. The problem happened at quarter to ten last night and took just less than an hour to fix. But some problems remained because the address data is cached externally by ISPs - these servers had to be …
Mistake, my arse! Let us not forget that Sweden is the world leader in 'stealth' technology and infiltration gadgetry. I reckon this is a test of Sweden's new 'stealth' internet. They were in fact there all the time but the rest of the world COULDN'T SEE THEM! No doubt we will ALL shortly know EXACTLY what they were up to when the ransom demands start flooding in. For One MILLION dollars. Mawahaha.
Always knew the Swedes were up to no good. No-one can be THAT inconspicuous by accident.
seems there had to be multiple failures here, for a start how did all of the DNS servers suffer at the same time? do they have it generate the zone once then replicate it automatically to all servers without any sort of sanity checks first? that's fine for a single website, but not for a TLD!
(i've had a few domains that needed dynamic zone files, and they all did sanity checks on the secondaries before importing the zones, so a fault with the scripts generating the files wouldn't knock everything offline)
I've done this about 3 times in 2 years, not block out Sweden but miss a trailing dot in a dns file when updating dns entries. It is a bit of a timebomb that hits about 5 hours later on our network and causes a fair old bit of fun until dmesg shows where I have gone wrong.
You can't beat good old fashioned 'uman error! Not just lusers who have pebcak issues.
You forgot flat-pack furniture.
Oh and Abba of course. We mustn't forget Abba. In fact I think it's illegal to forget Abba or something like that. Every time I get close to the nirvana of completely forgetting them, some complete bastard releases a film, play or compilation CD or there's some kind of "n years of Abba" event splattered all over the airwaves to remind me.
This time some so-and-so asked what the point of bloody Sweden was and there they bloody were, brought unbidden to mind by association. Another day of cheery, bouncy, crap tunes revolving round my mind. Damn.
For those who've not set up a domain - it's a relative path. So writing "somewhere.se" (no trailing dot) when you meant "somewhere.se." (trailing dot) is like writing "root" instead of "/root" or "Windows" instead of "C:\Windows": the paths are potentially valid but unlikely to be what you intended.
Every newbie DNS admin has made this mistake at least once, I wager. Taking out an entire TLD this way is a little better than most of us get the opportunity to do, of course - and it speaks volumes of quality control and management at the IFF. Entries in zone files have had periods at the end for at least 22 years, sheesh.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
