[ale] OT: XO dns outage?

[Alex Carver]

Nope, that's not how it works at all.  Your DNS provider is defined to 
be the authoritative resolver for your domain.  If someone perfroms a 
lookup on your domain, the chain of DNS servers passes the request 
onward from their computer to their ISP, the ISP server to it's backbone 
provider's servers, and upward through the chain until some DNS server 
somewhere says "I know who is the authoritative server for your request" 
and then it passes back down to that server (XO).  The top of the DNS 
chain can not resolve the lookup, it just knows who is supposed to be 
able to do that and proceeds to forward the request (or informs the 
original user's computer the final DNS server IP needed to perform the 
lookup.)  If XO's connections to all of their DNS servers go down you 
get what just happened, no lookups.  It's up to XO to have DNS servers 
on different connections in different locations in order to provide you 
stable service in the event of an outage.

If you want guaranteed uptime then you need to do one of the following: 
1) pressure XO to get extra servers somewhere else, 2) get additional 
DNS service with another provider to act as a backup DNS or 3) run your 
own DNS servers.


On 9/8/2013 11:27, Edward Holcroft wrote:
> They are back up now. 24 hour outage. Pretty bad communication from them
> ... no notification on their website, no e-mail, nothing.
>
> We were dead in the water for that time, even our Google Apps was set up to
> resolve through them.
>
> How does this happen? Isn't the whole point of DNS that there are multiple
> name servers globally so that an outage at one service provider does not
> cause all our url's to stop resolving? This event leads me to conclude that
> our entire zone file was referenced only on the XO servers and nowhere
> else. Can someone explain this?
>
> cheers
> ed
>
>
> On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 9:49 AM, Edward Holcroft <eholcroft at mkainc.com>wrote:
>
>> Anyone aware of an outage at XO dns? I cannot connect to any of my
>> servers, except by IP address.
>>
>> ed
>>
>> --
>> Edward Holcroft | Madsen Kneppers & Associates Inc.
>> 3020 Holcomb Bridge Rd. NW | Norcross, GA 30071
>> O (770) 446-9606 | M (770) 630-0949
>>
>
>
>
>
>
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