Tell HN: All .fj domains have gone offline

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30596404

by markdown • 4 years ago

93 49 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

domains.fj

fiji.gov.fj

usp.ac.fj

etc.

http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/fj.html

herpderperator• 4 years ago

It's true...

  couldn't get address for 'ns4.fj': not found
  couldn't get address for 'ns5.fj': not found
  couldn't get address for 'ns2.fj': not found
  couldn't get address for 'ns1.fj': not found
  couldn't get address for 'ns3.fj': not found
  dig: couldn't get address for 'ns4.fj': no more

kube-system3• 4 years ago

This is why I always say you should think twice when choosing a ccTLD if you don’t have a presence there. Not every registry has the same uptime as Verisign.

markdown7• 4 years ago

And yet to my knowledge this has never happened before.

sofixa• 4 years ago

Didn't .io ( which is a crime against humanity to boot) go down for a few hours a few years ago?

kube-system3• 4 years ago

Maybe not, but it is predicable that the quality and quantity of resources and governance available to a registry has an impact on their operations.

yosamino• 4 years ago

I vividly remember .de being offline causing trouble for a couple of hours in 2010.

https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/12/germany_top_level_dom...

Tepix• 4 years ago

Given the amount of past outages of ccTLDs we've seen (almost none), i'd say this problem is negligible and nothing to worry about.

There is one very recent exception however, the russian plans to partly separate from the internet shortly (especially regarding DNS) could well be an issue.

kube-system3• 4 years ago

Technical and legal issues that cause issues for customers at small ccTLDs are not uncommon. It all depends on who is running the registry. Try "cctld hijacked" and "cctld downtime" in your favorite search engine for a dozen or so examples.

Registries range in resources from "highly experienced billion-dollar organizations", to literally "we have a guy who updates the zone file in notepad", and they range in legal environment from, "functional democratic state with well-established judiciary" to "our government was violently overthrown this week".

Whether or not the problem is negligible depends on your particular use-case. For some, it might be a good choice, for others, it might not be.

teddyh2• 4 years ago

Like I have said before¹²: Neither your registrar nor your chosen TLD registry should be in the habit of suspending domains at the drop of a hat, or be at risk of going out of business suddenly. If you mostly trust your local government, your national ccTLD should suffice. In fact, it should be your default choice unless you have strong indications it does not fulfill the above criteria.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108933

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21614298

niftich• 4 years ago

Fijivillage.com reports: "All websites and apps hosted in Fiji with the dotcom.fj suffix are currently down and this has also affected Vodafone’s M-PAiSA services.

This is due to an outage in the University of the South Pacific hosted dotcom.fj domain." [1][2]

[1] https://www.fijivillage.com/news/All-websites--apps-in-Fiji-...

[2] https://twitter.com/fijivillage/status/1501070675691278339

londons_explore2• 4 years ago

And this folks is one of the reasons you don't use a 1 minute TTL on your DNS responses...

Mo3• 4 years ago

shamefully opens domain registrar and changes TTL

londons_explore2• 4 years ago

I use 24 hours on anything I'm not planning on making changes to. High TTL is a better experience for customers because they'll probably have it in local-ish caches even if there is internet routing disruption.

And 10 mins on anything I'm about to make changes to. That means if I accidentally make the wrong change, the 'blast radius' is minimized.

Obviously, when changing 24h down to 10 mins, keep a close eye on DNS server load, packet loss on links close to it, etc. If in doubt, raise and lower ttl's slowly.

mike_d• 4 years ago

3 of the 5 nameservers for fj are online and responding (they are all anycasted around the world). It looks like connectivity to Fiji itself is what is disrupted.

Two are operated by gransy.com and one by PCH.net (which you should consider donating to and helping random country codes stay online: https://www.pch.net/about/donate).

markdown7• 4 years ago

It's not connectivity to Fiji. The internet works just fine across the country. Only .fj domains (and email accounts) are affected.

Animats2• 4 years ago

University of the South Pacific, which runs the DNS servers, [1] is up.

Google's DNS server at 8.8.8.8 is having problems.

Lookup using DNS server of sonic.net, which is a normal DNS server.

    nslookup usp.ac.fj
    Server:  127.0.0.53
    Address: 127.0.0.53#53

    Non-authoritative answer:
    Name: usp.ac.fj
    Address: 144.120.141.80

Lookup with Google DNS:

    nslookup 
    > server 8.8.8.8
    Default server: 8.8.8.8
    Address: 8.8.8.8#53
    > usp.ac.fj
    Server: 8.8.8.8
    Address: 8.8.8.8#53

    ** server can't find usp.ac.fj: SERVFAIL

Checking example.com to make sure Google DNS server is live.

    > example.com
    Server:  8.8.8.8
    Address: 8.8.8.8#53

    Non-authoritative answer:
    Name: example.com
    Address: 93.184.216.34
    Name: example.com
    Address: 2606:2800:220:1:248:1893:25c8:1946

Also fails with 1.1.1.1 DNS server.

The Fiji DNS servers are unreachable, but you can get as far as a router at the University of the South Pacific. So the problem is local to there.

    traceroute 144.120.146.1
    traceroute to 144.120.146.1 (144.120.146.1), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
    ...
     8  AARNET-PTY.edge5.London1.Level3.net (217.163.113.74)  274.795 ms  274.476 ms  273.781 ms
     9  xe-0-0-0.pe1.a.suv.aarnet.net.au (113.197.15.213)  312.534 ms  311.764 ms  311.766 ms
    10  fastethernet0-0.aarnie.usp.ac.fj (202.158.204.194)  313.356 ms  312.176 ms  312.363 ms
    11  * * *
    12  * * *

[1] https://www.usp.ac.fj/

markdown7• 4 years ago

University of the South Pacific, which runs the DNS servers, [1] is up.

Not up from within Fiji. All government websites (and email) are down. Banks, Universities, mobile money wallets, etc.

Animats2• 4 years ago

DNS for Fiji seems to be back up.

Lascaille2• 4 years ago

That #10 step isn't on Fiji, Fiji isn't 1ms away from .au

mkj• 4 years ago

xe-0-0-0.pe1.a.suv.aarnet.net.au isn't in Australia

WelcomeShorty• 4 years ago

Oddly enough, right now..:

server 144.120.141.80 Default server: 144.120.141.80 Address: 144.120.141.80#53 usp.ac.fj Server: 144.120.141.80 Address: 144.120.141.80#53

* server can't find usp.ac.fj: SERVFAIL

throwaway190712• 4 years ago

This might be a DNSSEC issue rather than a nameserver reachability issue:

https://dnsviz.net/d/fj/dnssec/

benatkin• 4 years ago

I guess Google's DNS rigidly adheres to DNSSEC.

arantius• 4 years ago

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq#dnssec

"Google Public DNS is a validating, security-aware resolver. All responses from DNSSEC signed zones are validated unless clients explicitly set the CD flag in DNS requests to disable the validation."

helb• 4 years ago

Looks like you were right: https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2022-Mar...

adamkochanowicz• 4 years ago

Reachable for me.

markdown7• 4 years ago

Would you mind saying where in the world you are?

MaxBarraclough• 4 years ago

I'm late to the party, but https://fiji.gov.fj/ worked for me, although it was rather slow to load.

I'm in England, for what that's worth.

_1tan• 4 years ago

Working slowly from Germany as well.

kinow• 4 years ago

Not working for me, in New Zealand.

blikdak• 4 years ago

Is there anyone here in Fiji who can say they are OK?

chimbosonic• 4 years ago

Using a Recursive DNS server its down for me. UK based. I also setup a RIPE measurement for those interested. It asks for the NS record of ns1.fj.

https://atlas.ripe.net/measurements/39252885/#general

Tell HN: All .fj domains have gone offline

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