Re: .org domain went down.

Merlin Moncure asked:
> According to the register (covered by Slashdot), the .org domain went
> down for a little while. Isn't that the one running on a postgres
> server? Does anybody know anything about this?

Consider the sources of the information....

I Am Not An Official Mouthpiece, but do have something to do with
operations of .org.

The story seems to be based on a pretty outrageous interpretation of
something going on outside, either having to do with:

a) whois clients being misconfigured so that they access the wrong
server for .ORG.

Suppose you visit <http://www.crsnic.net/> and do a whois query on
slashdot.org. You will receive back the response:

No match for domain "SLASHDOT.ORG".

If you run an old version of whois ("old" meaning "not updated since
before March"), you'll get back much the same response, as whois
used to be set up to pull .org data from VGRS.

Perhaps someone was using an old whois, and misread the output to
indicate that .ORG was out of commission.

b) Possibly some other problem with crsnic.net

There seems to be some indication of similar problems with domains
in the .NET zone, which would point problems towards VGRS.

This "theory" is by no means clear, and may never be, if it
represented some temporary condition that they were quickly able to
resolve.

Either theory seems to fit quite well with the "evidence" in support of
the _The Register_ article...

Of course, what they then do is to infer that since [some local network
problem] has taken place, that therefore the *entire* ORG registry has
gone down without anyone having noticed.

This is no more outrageous than it would be for me to say: "I tried
calling my parents in Ottawa, and couldn't get through. I also couldn't
contact my brother in Halifax. Therefore, based on the evidence, it
appears that some fast-acting version of SARS has killed everyone in
Canada between Ottawa and Halifax." That theory sounds silly? So do
most of the ones at The Register and /.

In other not-necessarily-unrelated news, apparently a backhoe or other
construction took out a lot of Internet connections in the Boston area,
temporarily, which could certainly lead to troubled connectivity for
domain name servers. Supposing crsnic.net or some similar services were
pulling information through an affected connection, it wouldn't be too
remarkable for them to have had some glitchiness for a while.
--
(concatenate 'string "aa454" "@freenet.carleton.ca")
http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/spreadsheets.html
"The program is manufactured by Quantel, a Silicon Valley company
located in Clearwater, Florida."