DDOS on Namecheap Free DNS and Default DNS V2

http://status.namecheap.com/?p=14846

by hmart • 12 years ago

58 107 12 years ago

status.namecheap.com

micah63• 12 years ago

yup, our app is down : (

avb2• 12 years ago

Any good suggestions for alternative DNS providers?

zrail2• 12 years ago

I moved most of my stuff to Route53 awhile back and for the most part I don't regret it.

jschuur2• 12 years ago

Pricing doesn't seem too bad. $0.50 for a zone (domain) and $0.50 for a billion queries: http://aws.amazon.com/route53/pricing/

benmorris• 12 years ago

I've considered doing this also!

jmreid• 12 years ago

Yes, Route 53 has been great for me as well. I have my crucial DNS zones hosted there. But all the other stuff was on Namecheap's name servers.

I'll probably continue with that setup, but just make sure my TTL is set fairly high.

sparagi5• 12 years ago

We looked at Route 53, but would that make a difference today if your domain is registered at Namecheap?

If Namecheap is down, it does not get redirected.

jgrahamc• 12 years ago

You can use CloudFlare's free plan as DNS-only.

eli2• 12 years ago

It makes me nervous to rely on something that's a side benefit of a free service.

That said, I've heard Cloudflare's DNS network is faster than many paid alternatives.

cobrabyte• 12 years ago

We've been stoked with DNSimple.

daigoba662• 12 years ago

Instead of putting all of your eggs in (yet another) one basket, for a site with critical availability requirements I would distribute DNS over multiple providers. If any one provider goes down it is less likely to hurt overall site availability.

avb2• 12 years ago

Yes, multiple DNS providers should be the way to go.

blissofbeing2• 12 years ago

DNSMadeEasy, I just posted about them in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7275538

derwiki2• 12 years ago

Is there any point in freaking out or do we just have to wait this one out?

tinco3• 12 years ago

If it's absolutely critical that your users get service right now, it might be a good idea to at least prepare a migration to other DNS servers, like perhaps those of Linode. If the situation doesn't improve within an hour or so, it might be that they don't have a good way to deal with it, and the outtage might take long, depending on the depth of the DDoSers pockets.

tinco3• 12 years ago

Weird, I haven't researched DNS as well as I should have. I always lived under the impression that there was this extensive DNS cache network where intermediaries responded to queries with cached results from root DNS servers.

Instead, the second that this DDos hits is the second we have websites stopping working.

How is it that in this day and age we can't have distributed caches of DNS entries at our providers of full dns databases. I mean there can't be more than like a few billion dns entries in the world total, which fits easily in a modern desktop computers RAM.

If that is an underestimate, I can't believe a single modern server wouldn't be able to mirror the world's DNS queries for at least a providers worth of users.

jschuur2• 12 years ago

Depends on the TTL (time to live) settings for the DNS entries, doesn't it?

tinco3• 12 years ago

Yes, perhaps there lies our folly. It's the choice between being flexible in ability to move our servers really quick, or being tolerant of DNS servers going down.

I sort of hoped that a DNS client would just use an expired DNS result in case the servers would not respond, but perhaps that is naieve/dumb.

MichaelTieso• 12 years ago

That would explain why I'm getting a massive amount of tickets from my clients why their site is down.

kennhardy3• 12 years ago

Down for me as well. Lost access to absolutely all of my company's services. TTL 60...

ted010• 12 years ago

We are in the process of mitigating a large scale DDoS attack against our global DNS platform. We expect service to return to normal very shortly. Stay tuned and let me know if you have any questions. ted@namecheap.com

derwiki2• 12 years ago

Thanks for posting here!

sprouticus• 12 years ago

Thanks for the update, guys.

nubela• 12 years ago

Yes please, thank you :) All my domains are down now but I understand how shitty (the panic!) it feels to have things going down. I'll be checking this.

ChrisDiNicolas• 12 years ago

Good luck guys!

jik3• 12 years ago

Just for future reference, it's usually considered a good idea to put your status page on completely independent infrastructure so that it stays up even when the rest of your stuff goes down. A status page that doesn't work during an outage isn't particularly useful.

kennhardy3• 12 years ago

Like!

ilikesnowflakes3• 12 years ago

If the hackers really want to take you down, adding another server in isn't very hard...

ted010• 12 years ago

Good point. The status page is on another cloud but since this is a DNS issue, the subdomain is down. In the future, we'll investigate running this page on a secondary DNS.

w0ts0n• 12 years ago

You guys should really put a notice on your homepage or something.

Good luck.

tamar• 12 years ago

The homepage wasn't accessible until just a bit ago. We're still working on it.

tamar (also at Namecheap)

kitnos2• 12 years ago

do you have ETA?

ted010• 12 years ago

We're working hard to resolve this and we will keep you posted with updates here. Unfortunately, I can't give you an exact ETA.

t3ra• 12 years ago

WOOH the Akamai realtime attack visualization is completely red at the moment: http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz1.html

aroch• 12 years ago

Someone is apparently pissed at the state of Indiana, 105 attacks in the last 24hours

User74• 12 years ago

370,000 attacks/hour, but that is still 56% below average.. hmmm interesting!

MuratC2• 12 years ago

You need to provide some gift to your customers for this downtime. I am using NC for 10 years, every time on bad issues I continue to use. But this outage very bad, I lost money...

ilikesnowflakes3• 12 years ago

DDOS attacks are not up to Namecheap. You want money, go talk to the people doing it. These are very hard to prevent.

sparagi5• 12 years ago

If they messed up your cheeseburger, I could see this. How does this help this situation? It doesn't. Namecheap should take that money and invest in their infrastructure.

kelton50202• 12 years ago

Was going to switch to route 53 while you guys were down and switch back, but the page says it'll take a day...Might as well just wait at that point. I know it's panic mode over there, but some kind of failover record would be awesome for when this happens in the future(or an option for one).

irontoby3• 12 years ago

Everything related to DNS says it'll take a day but that's "worst case"... I've successfully transferred DNS for 5 Namecheap-registered domains to Route 53 since this all started a couple hours ago, and they're now up & running smoothly.

Their "update DNS server" page was acting a bit wonky, kept saying some of my nameservers were invalid when they weren't, but I eventually got them all switched.

This isn't a dig against Namecheap, it sounds like this attack is pretty bad, but for important domains Route53 just seems like a much better setup (geographically dispersed, different nameservers for each hosted zone, etc).

mindo3• 12 years ago

When did this attack start ?

ted010• 12 years ago

a little more than 2 hours ago

nc-customer3• 12 years ago

Most DDOS attacks against a company like yours are actually attacks against a specific customer. If:

a) you had a pool of DNS server names, say 20, all with unrelated hostnames

b) you assigned 2 to each customer, randomly, when they configured a domain to use your servers.

Then, a DDOS attack would impact 10% of your customers instead of 100%. (Assuming other practices, like null routing the target until resolved)

irontoby3• 12 years ago

Yes, this. Hopefully they take heed after this painful experience.

kitnos2• 12 years ago

hi already have OK's, but the DNS are all using the same IP :( bad sign?

ilikesnowflakes3• 12 years ago

You guys should add an option for us to put in an optional backup DNS record in the settings.

ted010• 12 years ago

DNS V1 is available and functioning.

ted010• 12 years ago

I'd also like to add that we have redunancy on our DNS V1. I advise switching over to this, in the meantime. Please find the tutorial here: https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx...

Jailout20003• 12 years ago

ETA how long it will take for the transfer to be completed? I know that editing host records usually is instantaneous (unlike other providers), but we're talking about changing the DNS servers here.

hypnotist• 12 years ago

Thanks! I just did the switch and the website was up in few minutes.

edwhitesell• 12 years ago

I had a couple of domains to try this on. One domain switched over within a minute. The other has been almost an hour. I'm assuming the TLD makes a difference?

.com was < 1 minute, .cm is > 55 minutes.

fw0rd• 12 years ago

I tried this and now for some reason my apache server is returning the default page. also I think it wiped out my mailserver settings -- my mail is hosted on namecheap. i guess i gotta wait till everything is fixed.

User74• 12 years ago

Ho quickly will the switch to v1 execute?

ted010• 12 years ago

It generally takes less than an hour.

dywtk2• 12 years ago

The quick tut on switching to DNSv1 is nice however the option doesnt exist in my account

trevorc• 12 years ago

I took your advice and transferred a domain to DNSv1. That domain is still not back online, but all the domains I left as DNSv2 have come back!

njyx• 12 years ago

Kudos for using a HN page to stay in touch

megakf• 12 years ago

Down again My domain down again

motoford2• 12 years ago

If your site is down and you are on v2, Switch to v1. It only takes a minute and it works.

julianc• 12 years ago

I switched and it's the same, still down.

motoford2• 12 years ago

At first I thought the same. I went in to edit records, and I hit save. I checked again and it was working. I assumed there was just a delay of a minute or so and that clicking save was a coincidence.

My domain is on v1 now and its still working.

eli2• 12 years ago

Well even if you switch to a different (working) nameserver, the old nameserver will still be cached all over the place so it will still appear down for many people.

jsm386• 12 years ago

Yeah - at least right now this worked for me. Thank you for the tip!

plasma• 12 years ago

How would one add (say) AWS Route53 as a secondary DNS?

I assume you'd make sure the DNS records are the same in both DNS portals; and then add Route53 as 3rd & 4th nameservers with the first and second still being Namecheap?

IgorPartola• 12 years ago

Yes, or just switch completely to Route53.

wes-exp• 12 years ago

It seems like secondary DNS is not supported, but you can change your primary DNS with the "Transfer DNS to Webhost" option.

srik• 12 years ago

This is so embarrassing for me. We just put out our school computer group's website up and boom - murphys law.

kennhardy3• 12 years ago

May this have been a problem lasting for a week?

I am monitoring a few servers with DNS records. And the last week I have found all the servers unresponsive (by DNS, not tried directly) from time to time. And after an extensive amount of troubleshooting I am unable to find a problem.

naiyt• 12 years ago

Best of luck to their support team. Outages can make tech support's life miserable. If you call in, just remember the person on the other side of the phone has likely been yelled at all morning for something that wasn't their fault. Totally reasonable to be upset at the situation, just don't take it out on the tech you're talking to!

User74• 12 years ago

Job security ;).. j/k! I imagine it must not be fun

User74• 12 years ago

I don't know how this website works, but I can't see the latest posts at the top of the page! I'm looking for the latest info on the issue. Are you up and running? Should I move back to v2? Thanks

hmart• 12 years ago

If you're affected, you can switch your domains to their DNSv1. Seems pretty quick for most people.

Via https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=edwhitesell

blissofbeing2• 12 years ago

I recently switched most of my domains to DNSMadeEasy because they are constantly in the top for speed[1], provide a top tier anycast network and for what you get are a great value.

If you want speed and readability I suggest switching to a paid DNS provider.

1: http://www.solvedns.com/dns-comparison/2014/01

BTW I'm not in any way affiliated, just like the service.

DDOS on Namecheap Free DNS and Default DNS V2

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