ZoneEdit goes titsup & takes ogre3d.org offline

I switched the Ogre DNS to ZoneEdit a while ago because I’d been getting some resilience problems with the servers provided by my registrar. I also paid (ZoneEdit is free for the basic service) to have an extra server so that we had 3 DNS servers pointing at ogre3d.org, all in different continents. I thought that would be enough.

Today, however, ns2.zoneedit.com ns3.zoneedit.com and ns17.zoneedit.com all went offline at the same time. This is almost unheard of, with 3 nameservers supposed to give you a 99.998% uptime over a year. I guess we’re somewhere inside the 17.52 hours of ‘acceptable’ downtime for such a setup. Perhaps I should get a 4th nameserver to improve it to 99.9999% (as claimed on their site). It appears that some of the other servers are still running (ns1, ns4, ns16 for example) so had we been on one of those we would have been ok. Gah.

Apologies for the outage, I hope they get their act together soon. I’ve asked the registrar to add their own (unreliable) name servers in as backup for now but the update will take a while. In the meantime you can access the OGRE website at http://216.32.66.50 .

** 17:40 GMT it appears to have recovered now, fingers crossed. **

Posted on December 19, 2006 by . This entry was posted in OGRE. Bookmark the permalink.
  • bradkitt

    hehe, I was just about to ask about this. Thanks for responding so promptly.

  • Phil

    Well, they have finally updated their status page. Hopefully, this means it will be fixed shortly =/

  • Kentamanos

    Just FYI. I was having a problem earlier, but then it worked again. It’s now not working again (you’re probably aware though).

    I’ll use the IP for now though, thanks for listing it :) .

  • WAW

    We are experiencing the same issues. They claim a DOS attack. Let’s hope it gets resolved soon!

  • http://blogometer.com/ Alan Gutierrez

    I am similiarly out. Not recovered as of this writing.

    In their status message, they note that, now that four of their servers are out, that you should get an extra DNS server from them. Apparently, it’s a lottery to see if you don’t get three of of the four DNS servers that are down.

    Wow. As I wrote this the DNS came back up.

  • Paul

    You don’t get 99.9999% uptime if the three servers are all right next to each other plugged into the same wall socket and router. DNS servers are “supposed” to be far away from each other.

  • http://www.stevestreeting.com Steve

    “You don’t get 99.9999% uptime if the three servers are all right next to each other plugged into the same wall socket and router.”

    .. and they’re not, see http://www.zoneedit.com/doc/network.html. All 3 of our DNS servers are in different physical locations.

  • vj

    I’m in the same boat. Emailed support, of course no response. No estimated ETA for fixing the problem.

    I’m going to look elsewhere for DNS service.

  • http://www.stevestreeting.com Steve

    To be fair, this is a pretty rare occurrence and ZoneEdit are very, very cheap for what you get. Interestingly the DNS servers at my ISP have gone down twice in the last week too, so I wonder if there’s a new attack going on in recent days.

  • vj

    Yes, but this has been going on for over 24 hours! That is unacceptable in this day and age, absent a major incident (Such as a blackout, 9/11, etc.).

    Luckily it is only impacting one domain that I host, but they have been without reliable email service for all that time.

    Unfortunately, there is an issue with the registrar, otherwise I’d have switched the name servers over to something else already.

  • vj

    The problem is that the domain in question is using ns2.zoneedit.com and ns3.zoneedit.com, with no third name server. These two nameservers are still not up.

  • Frenetic

    Of all the sites I visit, large and small, the only one I’ve ever had DNS problems with is Ogre3D. An inability to resolve ogre3d.org is something I can look forward to at least once every few months. And I don’t even frequent the site all that much.

    I’m in Canada (North America), if that helps any.

  • vj
  • vj

    ZoneEdit is finally coming clean. I just received this email from support:

    Dear Valued ZoneEdit Customer,

    The DNS servers ns2, ns3, and ns6 are experiencing malicious traffic which is impairing DNS services from being provided on these servers. Our engineers are diligently working to resolve the problems but we do not have an estimated time to a resolution at this time.

    If you are only using these name servers we highly recommend that you purchase a third, and a fourth nameserver. The cost of this service is minimal (only $10.95 for a year per extra nameserver), but the value you receive is huge. Each extra nameserver you add greatly increases the reliability. This will ensure your sites availability.

  • http://www.stevestreeting.com Steve

    @Frenetic: “Of all the sites I visit, large and small, the only one I’ve ever had DNS problems with is Ogre3D. An inability to resolve ogre3d.org is something I can look forward to at least once every few months. And I don’t even frequent the site all that much.”

    Well, this is certainly news to me. We switched to ZoneEdit precisely because our previous provider was dodgy, but this is the first DNS outage I’ve heard of in the last year.

    Other outages were not DNS related but scraper bot DOS attacks which I often have to battle. At 400,000 hits a day our server is on the edge of its capacity and I’m in negotiations for a new (more expensive) server as we speak, which will have larger capacity and better resilience. That’s the price of success, unfortunately. I do my best to keep everything running, but with this level of user traffic it can be tough when on a shoestring budget, hence why I’m going to be investing more in the site in the coming months.

    @vj: ah ok – ours is working (limping a bit) because we have a 3rd nameserver which isn’t affected anymore. If you’re only on ns2 and ns3 then you’re obviously using their free service, so really you can’t complain. You could ask for your money back of course, but… ;)

  • vj

    I’m not using the free service. I bought “zone credits” I’ve only got three name servers for some of my domains. I expected occassional outages, maybe a coule of hours, but not two days.

    Anyway, I’d gladly add another for this particular domain, but there’s nothing I can do about it, so what the hey.

  • Frenetic

    @Steve: “Well, this is certainly news to me. We switched to ZoneEdit precisely because our previous provider was dodgy, but this is the first DNS outage I’ve heard of in the last year.”

    *shrug* I had a feeling my problems were unique… maybe the ogre3d.org outages I’ve experienced for short times during previous months have just been a fluke. We’ll see. Since it sounds like it’s just me, it’s not really your problem. ;)

  • Oddrose

    what’s happening now? is the server down?

  • http://www.stevestreeting.com Steve

    I don’t know what happened, I’m finding out why my service provider wasn’t on it earlier. The monitoring service picked up that it had gone down.

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  • Aaron

    Sorry for thread necromancy, but a bunch of their servers are down again. ms5, ns18, ns13.

  • BJ

    .. and again 26/1/11 – again ZoneEdit are citing “malicious activity” as the cause (after ~13 hours of downtime). So much for lessons learnt …