That's one way to solve your problems...

So, last night around 10pm, LiveJournal stopped working for me (and pretty much everyone else, apparently). I played around a bit, and realized that the problem was with the DNS servers -- the LiveJournal servers themselves worked fine.

opal1159 was wonderful enough to let me know the IP of LiveJournal -- 66.150.66.50 obviously doesn't work anymore ;) With the appropriate IP in /etc/hosts, everything worked fine.

So I added that to /etc/hosts, then played a bit and realized that LiveJournal.org's DNS was on the same servers as LiveJournal.com's -- the result being that the status.livejournal.org page was equally dead. I was kind of curious as to why someone wouldn't have thought of moving the DNS for that domain to at least have a secondary nameserver in some other place -- LJ used to do that by using a DNS server running on ns2.bradfitz.com or something like that as a backup.

So, after the lj-maint post (and reading some of the comments by

crucially) I decided to check out the whois for LiveJournal again:

Domain Name Servers:
NS.LAYER42.NET
USW2.AKAM.NET
EUR1.AKAM.NET
ASIA2.AKAM.NET
NS1-118.AKAM.NET
NS1-142.AKAM.NET
USE3.AKAM.NET
USW7.AKAM.NET
AUS1.AKAM.NET

Yes, I suppose that switching your DNS service to be run by akamai would be *one* way to avoid a DDoS on your nameservers...

Tags: meta, tech

14 comments — :

( 14 comments — Leave a comment )

opal1159

2006-05-03 02:30 pm (UTC)

I don't know about you, but I could find out LJ's IP by trying to ping it. :P

catyak

2006-05-03 02:36 pm (UTC)

Not if you can't resolve the DNS in the first place. My first port of call would be the headers of email comment notifications, I think they arrive from the same IP address.

D

2006-05-03 02:43 pm (UTC)

That's what I thought, but I tried it anyway (during the downtime) and the Terminal gave it to me. (Are these things ever cached maybe?)

2006-05-03 02:48 pm (UTC)

Yes, it'll be cached in various DNS servers for some time. When the cache expires, it'll go look for the value again, and that's the point at which you'll lose out.

D

sarah_mascara

2006-05-03 03:42 pm (UTC)

Yeah, I don't know what half of that meant but when I was trying to check the status page last night and all I got were DNS errors I started to get angry.

Talk about stupid.

crschmidt

2006-05-03 03:47 pm (UTC)

Not really. Turns out ns2.sixapart.com is hosted in a completely different network, but that was equally attacked.

If someone's really out to get you, they'll get you no matter how hard you try to stop them. The only stupid people here are the ones attacking in the first place.

(Deleted comment)

2006-05-04 03:12 am (UTC)

WHOIS(1)                  BSD General Commands Manual                 WHOIS(1)

NAME
     whois -- Internet domain name and network number directory service

I always use whois at the command line. Web based tools suck.