Hi Richard, On Fri, Oct 22, 1999 at 11:19:22AM +1300, Richard Stevenson wrote:
I figured that you may all want to know that rata.vuw.ac.nz, one of the secondary nameservers for the nz ccTLD, will be out of service for an undetermined period of time tomorrow evening (Saturday 23 October 1999).
Nice to have some warning on this. However, 24 hours is a little slim for an event that will take out 1/6 of all recursive lookups on nz names "for an undetermined period", isn't it? I'm not trying to shoot the messenger. It's really good that you mailed this to the list. It does sound like someone at VUW needs to have RFC2010 shouted at them. The NS records for nz. on the root servers have a TTL of 48 hours, so there's not even any point in pulling the NS records from there, even if it was conceivable that you could find the right people to make it happen in anything like a short space of time. The only realistic alternative is for someone else to advertise vuw's routes over the weekend, and have a secondary nameserver numbered as 130.195.2.11 ready to answer queries for the time vuw is off the air... ... or maybe for Domainz to put their corporate foot down and say "don't mess with New Zealand's root servers". Sigh. The whole thing sounds very mickey mouse to me. Anybody would think that the NZ internet was an amateur hobbyist's network.
As part of our Y2K preparations, management here has decided that all of our core systems should be shut down, powered off, left to cool, and then restarted, to see what breaks. This will all happen tomorrow night. The shutdown and startup procedures will be carried out by unqualified staff (i.e. not even Unix-literate) as an experiment in system documentation standards.
That's just plain scary.
I hope to see you all on the other side.
No kidding. Joe --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog