Discount domains DNS servers Down?

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385 posts

Ultimate Geek

#3136579 29-Sep-2023 14:39

jarledb:

networkn:

Plenty of premium providers have outages all the time. Outages happen. Since you know nothing about the situation, I'd recommend keeping your assumptions to yourself.

A DNS provider that has set the DNS servers up right (and on seperate networks) should never have a complete outage.

When DNS goes down like this, you have not set it up right.

And setting it up right is not rocket science...

I'm with you here. Domain reg and DNS are their primary functions - Hosting etc are secondary. With DNS the way its designed your first thing should be getting your failover right on your DNS servers on different networks.

Their DNS servers are located separately (At least by IP / Subnet - Could be in the same rack with different data connections i guess) so why didn't a failure of their primary systems leave NS2 and NS3 working??

Matt Beechey

Mobius Network Solutions

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CamH

462 posts

Ultimate Geek

#3136582 29-Sep-2023 14:42

jarledb:

networkn:

Plenty of premium providers have outages all the time. Outages happen. Since you know nothing about the situation, I'd recommend keeping your assumptions to yourself.

A DNS provider that has set the DNS servers up right (and on seperate networks) should never have a complete outage.

When DNS goes down like this, you have not set it up right.

And setting it up right is not rocket science...

Absolutely this. We're a small company who hosts a few hundred domains, but even our DNS service is on multiple servers, across multiple networks, on multiple different domains and they can all function independently in the event of an outage at any point of the network.

I'm guessing though that what's happened here is that Dreamscape has tried to integrate the DiscountDomains/Freeparking Nameservers into their god-awful CrazyDomains system and it's failed (like it did last week with OpenHost). You'd think they'd put one nameserver into read only while they screwed around though.

mobiusnz

385 posts

Ultimate Geek

#3136583 29-Sep-2023 14:47

CamH:

networkn:

A DNS provider that has set the DNS servers up right (and on seperate networks) should never have a complete outage.

When DNS goes down like this, you have not set it up right.

And setting it up right is not rocket science...

Absolutely this. We're a small company who hosts a few hundred domains, but even our DNS service is on multiple servers, across multiple networks, on multiple different domains and they can all function independently in the event of an outage at any point of the network.

I'm guessing though that what's happened here is that Dreamscape has tried to integrate the DiscountDomains/Freeparking Nameservers into their god-awful CrazyDomains system and it's failed (like it did last week with OpenHost). You'd think they'd put one nameserver into read only while they screwed around though.

Or they did have decent redundancy etc but the servers were all connected and had the same authentication and so they all got hacked and encrypted at the same time.

You would think a DNS migration would be smoother than this - Surely you test it with a subset of domains and move things over progressively?

Matt Beechey

Mobius Network Solutions

networkn

Networkn
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#3136584 29-Sep-2023 14:50

jarledb:

A DNS provider that has set the DNS servers up right (and on seperate networks) should never have a complete outage.

When DNS goes down like this, you have not set it up right.

And setting it up right is not rocket science...

We have some customers on DD and they weren't affected this time, but were, in an outage I posted about previously.

MS are a 'premium' provider and 'regularly' let things expire such as SSL certs.

It may be that in this case 'cheap' was the cause, but assuming that is the reason is out of line.

As someone pointed out, they aren't cheap anyway.

jarledb

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#3136595 29-Sep-2023 15:20

networkn:

We have some customers on DD and they weren't affected this time, but were, in an outage I posted about previously.

Did they use their name servers?

I am continuously surprised by providers that don't set up their DNS infrastructure right.

It is not hard in 2023 to have multiple servers spread over several networks and locations to make sure that this type of problem doesn't happen.

I don't care if it is a cheap or expensive provider, if they are not able to do something as simple and fundemental as that, I don't trust them with anything.

BTW: For all the domains that I host for customers I have chosen to use someone that actually understands how to do DNS: Cloudflare.

And as for cheap: Cloudflare starts at exactly $0.

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MSP3837

4 posts

Wannabe Geek

#3136610 29-Sep-2023 15:51

I registered an account here to post this, we are migrating around 400 domains away from DD to SiteHost

Today shaved a few years of my life. Luckily some of our key clients were on CloudFlare for DNS already and we were in the process of moving everyone over eventually.

While I get all providers can have issues, DD et al seem to have more than their fair share, and the lack of communication and time it took to resolve is not acceptable.

concordnz

420 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#3136616 29-Sep-2023 16:02

MSP3837:
I registered an account here to post this, we are migrating around 400 domains away from DD to SiteHost

Today shaved a few years of my life. Luckily some of our key clients were on CloudFlare for DNS already and we were in the process of moving everyone over eventually.

While I get all providers can have issues, DD et al seem to have more than their fair share, and the lack of communication and time it took to resolve is not acceptable.

Welcome to Geekzone,
Sorry your arrival was under rather trying circumstances.

Conc.

mobiusnz

385 posts

Ultimate Geek

#3136623 29-Sep-2023 16:13

MSP3837:

I registered an account here to post this, we are migrating around 400 domains away from DD to SiteHost

Today shaved a few years of my life. Luckily some of our key clients were on CloudFlare for DNS already and we were in the process of moving everyone over eventually.

While I get all providers can have issues, DD et al seem to have more than their fair share, and the lack of communication and time it took to resolve is not acceptable.

I moved mine away a while back (A fair amount less) - The ones who remained are clients who register and pay for their own domain and I've been fairly neutral on not pushing them anywhere but already today some are just going to hand the domain to me to maintain with Metaname and on bill them and others I'll steer to another registrar. This is the biggest by far but they've had too many issues since the sale. I used to do everything with them as you could ring, would be talking directly to an engineer who would fix things on the spot. We are so far away from that now its not funny.

Matt Beechey

Mobius Network Solutions

MSP3837

4 posts

Wannabe Geek

#3136626 29-Sep-2023 16:19

mobiusnz:

MSP3837:

I registered an account here to post this, we are migrating around 400 domains away from DD to SiteHost

Today shaved a few years of my life. Luckily some of our key clients were on CloudFlare for DNS already and we were in the process of moving everyone over eventually.

While I get all providers can have issues, DD et al seem to have more than their fair share, and the lack of communication and time it took to resolve is not acceptable.

I moved mine away a while back (A fair amount less) - The ones who remained are clients who register and pay for their own domain and I've been fairly neutral on not pushing them anywhere but already today some are just going to hand the domain to me to maintain with Metaname and on bill them and others I'll steer to another registrar. This is the biggest by far but they've had too many issues since the sale. I used to do everything with them as you could ring, would be talking directly to an engineer who would fix things on the spot. We are so far away from that now its not funny.

We have used them for years (DD) and I agree after they got bought out things went downhill. Probably 99% of our clients have us manage their domain, the few that don't usually have it with their website provider, I try to make sure in this case its a web host who knows what they are doing when it comes to DNS.

I am just thankful in this case that we have not have had to rebuild the DNS for all domains.

mobiusnz

385 posts

Ultimate Geek

#3136627 29-Sep-2023 16:22

MSP3837:

We have used them for years (DD) and I agree after they got bought out things went downhill. Probably 99% of our clients have us manage their domain, the few that don't usually have it with their website provider, I try to make sure in this case its a web host who knows what they are doing when it comes to DNS.

I am just thankful in this case that we have not have had to rebuild the DNS for all domains.

Yeah - I was a little paranoid there would be a message at some point. "Services are restored. You will need to recreate any DNS records for your services".

Would have been a busy night - I can't imagine for 400 domains once you have TXT records for API's and services and DKIM etc etc

Actually - That would be a great service for a Registrar - The ability to download a domains DNS records as a Spreadsheet so you can keep them on file with ease.

Matt Beechey

Mobius Network Solutions

net24lm

17 posts

Geek

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Voyager / 1st Domains

#3136629 29-Sep-2023 16:28

jarledb:

networkn:

We have some customers on DD and they weren't affected this time, but were, in an outage I posted about previously.

Did they use their name servers?

I am continuously surprised by providers that don't set up their DNS infrastructure right.

It is not hard in 2023 to have multiple servers spread over several networks and locations to make sure that this type of problem doesn't happen.

I don't care if it is a cheap or expensive provider, if they are not able to do something as simple and fundemental as that, I don't trust them with anything.

BTW: For all the domains that I host for customers I have chosen to use someone that actually understands how to do DNS: Cloudflare.

And as for cheap: Cloudflare starts at exactly $0.

I agree with you here, DNS should be #1 for a provider of this size.

I work for 1st Domains / Voyager, so just in case anyone is curious what we do as a NZ Registrar, we leverage Cloudflare's DNS service for all our domains hosted on our DNS. So we have four DNS servers distributed globally, that are hidden behind Cloudflare's Edge DNS. So they query our DNS and then serve all public requests from cache. This ensures that customer domain lookups are always quick, and protects against DNS DDoS attacks (which are common!). TLDR - You get robust Cloudflare DNS with 1st Domains which equals better uptime and faster responses.

MSP3837

4 posts

Wannabe Geek

#3136631 29-Sep-2023 16:35

mobiusnz:

MSP3837:

We have used them for years (DD) and I agree after they got bought out things went downhill. Probably 99% of our clients have us manage their domain, the few that don't usually have it with their website provider, I try to make sure in this case its a web host who knows what they are doing when it comes to DNS.

I am just thankful in this case that we have not have had to rebuild the DNS for all domains.

Yeah - I was a little paranoid there would be a message at some point. "Services are restored. You will need to recreate any DNS records for your services".

Would have been a busy night - I can't imagine for 400 domains once you have TXT records for API's and services and DKIM etc etc

Actually - That would be a great service for a Registrar - The ability to download a domains DNS records as a Spreadsheet so you can keep them on file with ease.

To be honest, I don't know how long it would have taken. Common records for 365 etc would have been fairly simple to set up, but yeah, all the more bespoke ones, yikes. Days probably. Agreed the ability to back up all your DNS to a zone file of some sort would be really good.

Criggie

24 posts

Geek

#3136645 29-Sep-2023 16:59

MSP3837:
the ability to back up all your DNS to a zone file of some sort would be really good.

Long ago I remember using AXFR (zone transfer) to do this task called nightly from cron.
But this is no-longer offered, likely for security.

dig -t axfr criggie.org.nz

The dirtier and less-useful is to store all your hostnames somewhere and iterate over them with an ANY and dump that output to a file.

dig +noall +answer +multiline criggie.org.nz any
dig +noall +answer +multiline www.criggie.org.nz any
dig +noall +answer +multiline donkey.criggie.org.nz any

but the downside of this is you might not get every hostname set up in your domain.

That said, some records is better than none and disk is cheap.

thabass

34 posts

Geek

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#3136713 29-Sep-2023 21:23

After a very interesting day... Any word from DD re a PIR?

A couple of organizations I spoke with today mentioned interest in Azure DNS and Cloudflare.

Any thoughts/recommendations on other DNS providers?

MSP3837

4 posts

Wannabe Geek

#3136720 29-Sep-2023 21:46

thabass:

After a very interesting day... Any word from DD re a PIR?

A couple of organizations I spoke with today mentioned interest in Azure DNS and Cloudflare.

Any thoughts/recommendations on other DNS providers?

"Interesting" would be putting it mildly. Luckily most emails sent during this time have been delivered albeit delayed.

Both Cloudflare and Azure are good from what I understand, we only have experience with Cloudflare and only on a few domains, soon to be a lot more.

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