Re: DNS Flag Day, Friday, Feb 1st, 2019

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

> On Jan 30, 2019, at 17:40 , Jim Popovitch via NANOG <nanog () nanog org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2019-01-30 at 17:22 -0800, Matthew Petach wrote:
> > Any chance this could wait until say the Tuesday 
> > *after* the Superbowl, when we aren't cutting an 
> > entire religion's worth of potential workers out of 
> > the workforce available to fix issues in case it 
> > turns out to be a bigger problem than is expected, 
> > and when we have less chance of annoying the 
> > vast army of football-loving fans of every sort? 
>
> IIRC, DNS Flag Day was announce way before last years Super Bowl...
> what did the people who aren't ready for DNS Flag Day do in the past
> 364 days that they need a few more days to get ready for?
>
> -Jim P.

Consider this…

Sometimes you are responsible for fielding the calls and explaining problems that occur on systems that aren’t entirely 
within your control.

A business class ISP, for example, would have a hard time proactively fixing all of their customer’s DNS resolvers and 
clients. Nonetheless, you can be assured that their call center will get the calls when the behavior of DNS changes in 
a way that negatively impacts some fraction of those clients.

In my estimation, the most likely impact of this event will be on the enterprise, not the ISP or residential 
communities.

The ISP community is either aware of and/or dealt with it in the normal course of business or they have had their head 
so deep in the sand that I don’t have much sympathy for what happens to them.

The residential end user doesn’t run name servers for the most part, so, unlikely to be much impact there. The ones 
that do (such as myself) are likely technical enough and likely sufficiently involved in the ISP community to have 
heard about this issue and taken appropriate action.

In my experience, enterprise IT, OTOH, is widely variable in its attentiveness to changes on the internet until after 
they have occurred. Network focused enterprises (e.g. Akamai, DropBox, etc.) are unlikely to be impacted. Other kinds 
of enterprises for whom the internet is more of a utility than a core function, OTOH, may have less awareness ahead of 
time (e.g. Chevron, GM, your local dive shop, the bodega on the corner, etc.).

The larger enterprises probably have someone paying some attention. I suspect most of the casualties in this event will 
be in the Small to Medium business community.

Owen