Re: Microsoft spokesperson blames ICANN

[Adrian Chadd <adrian () creative net au>]

On Wed, Jan 24, 2001, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> [ On Wednesday, January 24, 2001 at 13:09:45 (-0800), Roeland Meyer wrote: ]
> > Subject: RE: Microsoft spokesperson blames ICANN
> >
> > From our efforts, it is not at all surprising that someone, at MSFT, munged
> > the DNS configuration, totally. Even their best guru could have done it, due
> > to the murky nature of the config. I suspect that there are less than 100
> > ppl that could even have a clue, in this area, and they don't all have the
> > same pieces of clue.
>
> That's absolutely idiotic (of M$, that is !;-).  Even more idiotic than
> putting all their nameservers in one basket, so to speak.
>
> I'd bet any high-school kid who had any experience whatsoever at
> installing Linux or FreeBSD could no doubt blow a real OS and a native
> BIND install onto any sufficiently capable set of four machines in about
> an hour or so and provided that someone could cough up at least a
> half-baked zone file from somewhere to load on them they'd all be online
> and answering to the registered nameserver IP numbers in no time flat.
> Certainly in less than what's apparently going to be at least 23 hours
> now!

I'm going to play devils advocate here.

* I bet any high school kid setup Linux or FreeBSD box will probably die
  under the load of M$'s zones - the default out-of-the-box config
  is nice, but not *nice*.
* You have no idea whether M$'s DNS servers are serving static zone
  files, back ended to a database, talking to a mapper of some sort,
  whatever.

As someone mentioned, there are things such as maintenence windows which
explaining to management you need to break can sometimes be painful.

That said, I think it being dead for 23 hours is a little strange, but
then we don't know the exact story so we could be pointing the blame
at exactly the wrong place(s).


Adrian