Open Source

By Peter Junge

A look at China's Linux and open source movement

Blame DNS stuffups, not the earthquake

Posted in Open Source by Michael Iannini on Thursday, December 28 2006 03:12 PM

The blame for Asia's Internet crisis this week has been put largely on the earthquake, and rightly so. But, in the case of China, I wonder if the earthquake is being used more as a scapegoat for their continued mismanagement of DNS servers. I run an IT service company that manages broadband and hosting services for clients, so we are quite sensitive to the network ups-and-downs of ISPs here.

Four times in the month previous to the earthquake, DNS foul ups knocked out connections to a lot of mail and Web servers, for durations of up to a few hours. This is of course not as bad as yesterday's DNS issues, which occurred after the earthquake and ran approximately for eight hours. How can I be so sure this is more a case of DNS and not just connectivity in general, caused by over-capacity, backup lines because servers were still accessible by IP.

The earthquake struck at 8:56pm the day before and most Web sites, despite this, were still accessible--albeit slow--till about 8am the next morning. I imagine traffic forced China Telecom and CNC to react because they couldn't coordinate much before the working hours of the next day, and when they did react, even connections to all local servers were lost, at least via DNS. I would love to be educated on this further and will definitely investigate further, but till now, all my staff and I keep getting are 'earthquake' excuses, and no matter how many times we pepper the ISPs here about IP-related issues, they all get dismissed with shrugs of the shoulders.

Other interesting DNS abuse can be read at my friend Bjorn Stabbell's blog. If not being able to get a Web site is frustrating when the right domain is typed in, I have to say getting the wrong site is even more frustrating, especially to ad sites quick at trying to download spyware.

Disclaimer:
Views and opinions expressed in this blog are the author's, and do not necessarily represent those of ZDNet Asia.

Talkback 3 comments

China mainland IP's are not always ping able, intermittent at best. Thus would not be a DNS issue, would be a Physical layer issue. The Earthquake being a 5.5 or higher with the bedrock they have as ground in China allowed movement and thus severing a few of the OC fiber lines between sites. Thus intermittent issues.
Posted by Brian on Saturday, December 30 2006 02:28 AM

The main problem is that all root DNS servers are outside of China.

So even local servers on local IP's would not work because DNS discovery was crapped out.

The worst is by far the dodgy chinese sales to bodogs.com or whatever it is for DNS lookups.

I expect a 404 error when I get a missing page or server. Instead it comes back with a fake chinese language IE error page (I use ennglish Camino on a MAC!) and then all my server scripts are F *cked!

China does have a real problem with A) Not having a good command of the technology and B) not following international guidelines and protocols.

It is simnply amazing how the oldest and most important Internet service - DNS is so blatantly and carelessly messed with here. And for what? A cheap grab a cash in the profiteering failed lookups redirection? Or a bad case of poort internet design and deployment. Excusable when you are the pinoeers of tech. But when you mearly have to copy it and use already understood protocols - there is no excuse for getting it wrong.

It is quite ironic how china is so good at copying DVD's and other Interllectual Property (See SinoPec and the US Made oilfield survey software and the jailed Chinese students) yet they can't even copy and deploy a widly documented and free software run system like DNS!
Posted by Peach on Tuesday, January 02 2007 08:14 PM

Inside China Ping and almost all ICMP traffic is blocked.

So never use PING or anythign to do with ICMP when dealign with China.

Hell even most of the ISP's don't publish their routing protocols or share them - hence the crap service due to the heavy use of static routing tables.
Posted by Peach on Tuesday, January 02 2007 08:16 PM

Latest in Blog Central

Subscribe to BlogCentral

Click this link to view this blog as XML.
Add this feed to your online news reader

About the blogger

Peter Junge

Peter Junge is a long-time user and fan of open source software (OSS), especially Linux. For over eight years now, he's been an OSS IT professional, filling different roles in the OpenOffice.org project. Peter currently lives in Beijing, China, where he pays his bills working as program manager and senior engineer for a local company that develops products based on OpenOffice.org. He is also an active member of the Beijing Linux User Group.