Re: The resilient distributed nature of the Internet?
Maybe we should all take some responsibility for our own stuff.
And only one upvote allowed !
At my last place, we ran the DNS for around 600+ customer domains - and when I started it was hosted on two servers sat in the same rack and protected by the same dead UPS. One was on a different internet connection though.
When I left, we still hosted the master in our own server room, but employed a 3rd party to run secondaries for us - so an outage either at ourselves or at the 3rd party could not bring down the DNS for those domains.
But also when I left, manglement were busy getting rid of anything needing brain cells - and were transferring the DNS to a significantly inferior hosting service, with a PITA GUI, significantly reduced features, and most critically, all under one hosting provider who had already had more than one major outage in the couple of years we'd been using them.
For good measure, the main mangler decided to just rip out all the infrastructure (documented, reliable, worked flawlessly for many months after I'd left until it got mangled) - partly on the basis of "I don't understand it, so it's coming out". Had he asked anyone with a clue, he could have avoided taking out the master for 200 domains and having them die a week later as the secondaries expired their cached entries (fun when your VoIP phones go down due to a DNS issue). For starters, the 3rd party hosting had a neat feature that would have allowed promoting them to using a local database - so a few clicks per domain would have dealt with it. Instead they left it till it started taking customers offline and then went into panic mode.
Still, said manglement were well versed in outright lying to customers - no doubt they'll have blamed a 3rd party service for the outage.
I use OpenDNS instead of ISP's DNS service. I'm never affected by DNS outages as an errors just lead to the use of a cached entry.
Do you only use Open DNS ? If so then you're at the mercy of OpenDNS and if they have a major outage. Only if you use them PLUS another completely independent service do you get that degree of resilience talked about in this article.