Re: cable cut, sat-3 maybe? in early 2000s

On Mon 2012-05-14 (21:54), Mike Lawrie wrote:
> I have no recollection of the failure of .za nameservers that Joe 
> describes -- not even arising from 9/11. AFAIK, South African ISPs 
> had backup circuits via satellite to cater for disruptions to the 
> SAT3 service, and there were such disruptions and the satellite links 
> did kick in. They gave a choked service, both in capacity and in 
> inherent response times. But failures of the .za domain, no.

There were failures DNS as a result of a SAT-3 break; I remember them.  At
one stage we had notes in our BIND config relating to them -- the problem
wasn't .za; it was the fact that the root servers weren't accessible.  We
had to create a forward zone pointing to the (working) .za on hippo in order
to get local connectivity back.

However, I think they were isolated to providers who were single homed and
who didn't have any provision for backup international links.  At the time,
TENET was one such provider.  I certainly don't recall the major commercial
providers having a problem, and we actually used this to work around the
problem by NAT'ing our recursive DNS servers onto a network that did have
access.  For us the problem also didn't last terribly long, and we (like I'm
sure others) maak 'n plan to get around it.

- Guy
-- 
Systems Manager, IT Division, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa
Email: G.Halse-3pOAqoja4/[email protected]   Web: http://mombe.org/  IRC: [email protected]
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