Unable to reach my linode by DNS names

@haus:

Suddenly I'm totally unable to reach my linode by DNS name. I'm in fremont.

tracert Unable to resolve target system name can anyone help?

This is all of a sudden, with no change to my linode by me. Just seems to have started this afternoon.

I can get in via ssh only by my IP address.

The Linode nameservers were down

edit: obfuscated the quoted text on request of the OP

Thanks. I didn't see anything in linode status or twitter…are they still supposed to be down? I was able to get to the domain I posted above but none of my other vhosts.

Seems to be working intermittently. I guess they are having issues and they haven't updated status.linode.com yet. At least I hope it's not just me. I'll give it awhile and see if things come back up on their own.

ns1 through ns4 aren't working for me; ns5.linode.com is working.

Thanks Graycode, I just tried ns5 and it did return the correct IP. I guess this is not just my Linode, so they'll get it fixed at some point and I can go back to whatever else it was I was doing. :)

Wow - I have to admit it's a little concerning that something could happen to take four (ns1-ns4) authoritative servers offline simultaneously, in what is presumably a geographically distributed setup. I'm guessing it was some sort of code or data update, but would have hoped that something like that was never done to all servers simultaneously.

– David

@db3l:

Wow - I have to admit it's a little concerning that something could happen to take four (ns1-ns4) authoritative servers offline simultaneously, in what is presumably a geographically distributed setup. I'm guessing it was some sort of code or data update, but would have hoped that something like that was never done to all servers simultaneously.

– David

Actually, initially it was ns1-ns5 that were down.

So what do you guys suggest to help prevent this from happening again? My sites were essentially knocked offline yesterday?

I moved all of my DNS to Linode because it's easier to manage here than at my registrar. I guess I could use someone else or roll my own, which I really don't want to do. Would a really long TTL have helped? But a really long TTL then makes it difficult to roll out changes within a few hours or move a site to a new server. However, a long TTL still doesn't fix the issue of someone who's hitting your site for the first time or it's been awhile and their DNS servers don't have your information in their cache….

I roll my own and have linode's as a slave, if mine goes poof then linode's take over, if linodes go down and mine's still running everything is shiny.

I did notice that my outbound dns failed during the outage so I couldn't contact the world from my linode but the world could contact me, sounds like a pretty nasty outage.

I use DNS Made Easy for another site, but (in the absence of any detail as to what caused this problem at Linode) I have to assume something like this could hit anywhere.

I'm chalking this one up to a learning experience…now I know what it looks like when name servers go down. At least in my experience this is not common, though I'd love to know what happened (Linode may not say) just from an educational standpoint.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think for outbound DNS you could specify other name servers in your /etc/resolv.conf (you need to set up static IP, though, otherwise the changes won't stick).

http://library.linode.com/networking/co … r_settings">http://library.linode.com/networking/configuring-static-ip-interfaces/#dnsresolversettings

Edit:

For inbound DNS, don't know…sounds like obs has a solution I'll read up on.

@waldo:

So what do you guys suggest to help prevent this from happening again? My sites were essentially knocked offline yesterday?

I moved all of my DNS to Linode because it's easier to manage here than at my registrar. I guess I could use someone else or roll my own, which I really don't want to do. Would a really long TTL have helped? But a really long TTL then makes it difficult to roll out changes within a few hours or move a site to a new server. However, a long TTL still doesn't fix the issue of someone who's hitting your site for the first time or it's been awhile and their DNS servers don't have your information in their cache….

You may want to use some other free DNS service also, eg https://dns.he.net/, and have one be a slave of the other.

Tbh the outbound dns didn't bother me a bit all it did was make monit squeel that it couldn't resolve.

However if you're running a service that uses say facebook apis then a secondary dns resolver might be wise.