On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 11:57:46AM -0600, Frank Bulk - iName.com wrote:
There was all kinds of press coverage about the outage, but not a lot of technical detail.
Based on reports, Comcast Internet customers in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia, New York, New Hampshire, and parts of Washington, D.C. were without access their DNS server(s) from about 8:30 pm Eastern to 11:30 pm Eastern, though some say it started as early at 8 pm and ended after midnight. NBC was told by a Comcast technician that outages were spread out over six states in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. Comcast said that phone and CATV customers were not affected.
According to published reports, Comcast was performing regular maintenance on their DNS servers and something went wrong. A Comcast spokesman said on Monday that "Last night, our engineers identified a server issue that was affecting Internet service in Boston, parts of New England and the DC/Beltway areas".
Comcast did not share how many customers were affected.
BTW, did anyone look at http://dns.comcast.net/status.php during this outage?
Reading material for those who are interested, but no technical explanation given either (not surprising; outages like this are often kept quiet for some time while the company tries to figure out what happened, why, and get impacted customer counts). http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Comcast-Suffers-Major-East-Coast-Outage-1... Depending on Comcast's infrastructure and the nature of the failure (I'm on the west coast and witnessed nothing), it might not be possible to determine the number of impacted customers. For example, if I shut off one of our primary nameservers (powered it down, shut down named/BIND, etc.) I'd have no idea how many people were "impacted"; I'd have to speculate based on the number of queries seen against the secondary. Anyway, all the what-ifs should probably be discussed on outages-discuss and not here, but I just wanted to throw that out there. -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc@parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB |