Hi all 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). 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. I hope to see you all on the other side. Regards Richard ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Richard Stevenson Systems Engineer, Information Technology Services Victoria University of Wellington Phone: +64 4 4635051 Fax: +64 4 4635552 Being a Unix system administrator is like being a tech in a biological warfare laboratory, except that none of the substances are labeled consistently, any of the compounds are just as likely to kill you by themselves as they are when mixed with one another, and it is never clear what distinction is made between a catastrophic failure in the lab and a successful test in the field. (--M. Tiemann) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
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
For Your Information.
rata.vuw.ac.nz was taken down on Sat, 23 Oct 1999 7:37:27 PM. Total outage
time was 1 hour, 53 minutes
Rata was successfully restored to service.
VUW has recently implemented a Change Control Process that issues permits
for planned outages which include timely notification to interested
clients/customers (Unplanned outages will be notified in future ASAP after
the event)
In future we will attempt to provide more timely information regarding
outage notification of rata.vuw.ac.nz, being one of the secondary
nameservers for the nz ccTLD, via NZNOG and any other means that can be
identified.
Please accept our apologies for short notice, and accept that it has been
difficult to discover who to advise of such outages in the past, and NZOG
will be included in future.
regards
Russell Sharpe
------------------------------------------------------------
Russell Sharpe Phone:+64 4 463 5554
Network Manager Fax: +64 21 218 1289
Information Technology Services Cell: +64 21 682 541
Victoria University of Wellington russell.sharpe(a)vuw.ac.nz
PO Box 600 Wellington www.vuw.ac.nz
New Zealand
------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: Richard Stevenson
Hi all
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).
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.
I hope to see you all on the other side.
Regards
Richard
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Stevenson Systems Engineer, Information Technology Services Victoria University of Wellington Phone: +64 4 4635051 Fax: +64 4 4635552
<<SNIP>> --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
Please accept our apologies for short notice, and accept that it has been difficult to discover who to advise of such outages in the past, and NZOG will be included in future.
It should only be necessary for you to inform the system administrator for the master name server. That person can then look at implications of such an outage and inform industry. If DOMAINZ had an ounce of clue, they would set up an announce only list for system outages, so anybody who wanted to be informed could subscribe at their leisure. Peter Mott Chief Enthusiast 2DAY INTERNET LIMITED -/- --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
participants (4)
-
Joe Abley -
Peter Mott -
Richard Stevenson -
Russell Sharpe