Re: Spain was offline

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb () cs columbia edu>]

On Thu, 31 Aug 2006 13:03:38 -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu wrote:

> On Thu, 31 Aug 2006 17:30:37 BST, Peter Corlett said:
>
> > OTOH, I can believe that somebody broke a Perl script critical to it  
> > and it rolled out a valid, but empty, zonefile which the secondaries  
> > faithfully replicated. Not that I've watched cascading DNS failures  
> > at too many places with bits of crufty Perl, oh no...
>
> ISTR some database extract failing in a new and unusual way a few years
> ago, and about 1/3 of the entire .com domain evaporolated for several hours....
This is an old, old story -- such failures have been with us for a long
time.  Not all that many years ago, the entire (US) 800 number system was
down for a similar reason -- the program that populated the production
database from the back end master copies hiccupped, and things got *very*
confused.

For many more stories like this, see the archives of the RISKS Digest
(http://www.risks.org).

                --Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb