A.P. Lawrence

DNS problems at Network Solutions

I had several people mention that they couldn't reach aplawrence.com yesterday. Coincidentally, I also noticed a dramatic decrease in spam (a good thing) and a 30 percent fall-off from normal web traffic (not such a good thing).

I did some investigating and found that the problem seemed to be at Network Solutions, which handles DNS for aplawrence.com and just a few million other folks. I posted a newsgroup question about this, and got confirmation that other people have seen the same problem.

Path: local01.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.comcast.com!news.comcast.com.POSTED!not-for-mail
NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 20:17:20 -0500
From: Barry Margolin 
Newsgroups: comp.security.misc
Mail-Copies-To: nobody
Subject: Re: More DNS poisoning?
Organization: Symantec
References: 
User-Agent: MT-NewsWatcher/3.4 (PPC Mac OS X)
X-Copies-To: never
Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 21:17:20 -0400
Message-ID: 
Lines: 40
NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.128.234.87
X-Complaints-To: abuse@comcast.net
X-DMCA-Complaints-To: dmca@comcast.net
X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers
X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly
X-Postfilter: 1.3.32
Xref: number1.nntp.dca.giganews.com comp.security.misc:80751

In article ,
 Tony Lawrence  wrote:

> Amazingly enough, although a Comcast customer for internet, I haven't 
> seen any DNS problems until today, and even today it seems to be minor 
> and intermittent.
> 
> But I have had email from several people today asking if my web site is 
> down (it isn't), and I notice that when I ssh out to various sites I'm 
> having some trouble with DNS here and there - mostly with names using 
> networksolutions for DNS (though it's very hard to tell absolutely of 
> course).  I don't think the problem is networksoltions because I can 
> usually do a dig@oneoftheirservers and get a response, but something is 
> broken somewhere - or a big router is having problems somewhere maybe?
> 
> Anybody else noticing this?  Of the people I heard from, I know that two 
> of them are Verizon customers, but I don't know the others..
> 
> And of course it's also obvious that their dns issue must be 
> intermittent also because otherwise I wouldn't have gotten their email 
> asking me if I'm down.. :-)

There have been problems with the worldnic.com nameservers all day.  
This morning I wasn't able to query many of them at all.  Since this 
afternoon I have been able to query them directly, but queries through 
several ISP's recursive servers, including AT&T, Comcast, and 
Level(3)/Verizon, are still failing.

One of my customers owns a domain that Network Solutions hosts, so we 
called them and opened a service request.  The CSR didn't have a 
detailed explanation, just that they've been having server problems.

My current theory is that they've installed firewalls in front of their 
nameservers, and they're treating the high-volume queries from ISP 
nameservers as a DOS attack and blocking them.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***

Comments /Forum/TonyLawrence16.html


Mon Apr 25 21:19:23 2005: Subject: Still having DNS problems?   anonymous
are you still having dns problems? We continue to have sporadic problems with e-mail delivery, mainly due to reverse dns lookup failures.



Mon Apr 25 21:51:58 2005: Subject:   TonyLawrence
I'm not having problems, and site activity seems normal again, but I have heard from a few people who still are experiencing minor problems..





Tue Apr 26 00:41:22 2005: Subject: Problems   anonymous
Just to confirm. As of 7:30CST on Monday, Network Solutions was still having problems resolving my domain name. The customer service people refused to provide a direct link to any official confirmation of the issue on their website.



Tue Apr 26 03:16:11 2005: Subject:   anonymous
I have had cust's down since Fri. I just got off the phone with Net Sol for the 2nd time today. Magically, my cust's DNS just started resolving my host names! Good luck guys.



Tue Apr 26 16:01:18 2005: Subject:   anonymous
I recieved the following as a result of a trouble ticket.



From: CustServ [mailto:siebelcustserv@networksolutions.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2005 12:45 AM
To: xxxxx@xxxxxxxxx.com
Subject: Network Solutions Service Request Number 1-193xxx192 xxxxxxxxxx.COM



Dear xxxx xxxxxxxx

The issue you reported to Network Solutions on 4/25/2005 11:26:38 AM and assigned Service Request 1-193xxx192 has been completed and closed.

We are currently experiencing a degradation of service on some of our servers. Our engineering team is aware of the issue and it is our top priority to resolve. We apologize for any inconvenience you may be experiencing.


If you have additional questions about this request, please contact us at customerservice@networksolutions.com. Or call us at 1-888-642-9675 within the U.S. and Canada and at 1-703-742-0914 outside the U.S.

Thank you for choosing Network Solutions.

Sincerely

Technical Services Delivery
Network Solutions, Inc.

Network Solutions Service Request Number: 1-193xxx192 xxxxxxxxxx.COM

** Please do not reply to this email as this is sent from a non-response email address.


Wed May 4 02:43:51 2005: Subject:   anonymous
As of today (4 may 2005) there are still problems at Network Solutions.


Our DNS records are hosted on ns57.worldnic.com & ns58.worldnic.com both of which still appear broken.
I have spoken to Network Solutions several times (from AU) and still no resolution.
Unfortunately I can't transfer my domains away from NS as there appears to be nothing to transfer - therein lies the problem.
An absolutely abysmal situation.

Tue Jul 5 20:27:49 2005: Subject:   anonymous
Looks like the problems have returned (July 5). We cannot reach a number a sites, all hosted by Network Solutions, from our firewalled BIND servers.

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Wed Jul 6 16:06:02 2005: Subject:   anonymous
I can confirm that on July 5 (and now 6) I am having trouble resolving the mx record for a site on ns11.worldnic.com and ns12.worldnic.com -- oddly, the a record looks up fine every time. With the mx record, sometimes I get no response, sometimes I get a list of the root servers, and sometimes I get the valid response.



Fri Jul 8 17:04:26 2005: Subject: The saga continues   anonymous
I'm also having trouble with an NSI-hosted domain (July 8).



Fri Jul 8 20:01:17 2005: Subject: NSI DNS problems July 8   anonymous
We have been having sporadic problems for several days with other mail servers unable to do a reverse dns lookup on our NSI-hosted domain. Today things seem to be getting worse and we are getting no info from NSI.



Sat Jul 9 01:20:48 2005: Subject: Same problem with NetSol DNS   anonymous
Having same problems with couple outside places trying to do reverse lookups for email etc. Anyone know what the issue is?



Wed Jul 12 01:06:46 2006: Subject: Major Problems With Network Solutions   anonymous
As an IT consultant I have migrated a number of my clients over to Network Solutions. Like Moses, after getting my people out of bondage... I come to fine out I led them into a world/path of chaos!... Tonight 7/11/06 my clients have been calling our offices saying. "We can't get onto our Email or Websites". After calling Network Solutions "VIP" Tech support. I gave up. No one answers the phone. All you hear is a "Wedding March Song"... Hard for me to recommend a company who has such a large profile yet when they go down they abandonedd their loyal subscribers. "Think twice before leaping" I would say and do your home work. As questions. How good are your systems and how good is your tech support. For hours I heard "I'm sorry and I appologize"; "Our engineers are working on the problem and we don't know when it will be fixed"...


So now all our clients sit and wait!



Wed Jul 12 14:46:39 2006: Subject:   BigDumbDinosaur
The above is why I encourage my clients to run their own DNS/mail/web servers and let me administer it for them. The phone (almost) always gets answered around here. The less dependent I am on others to provide such essential services the better I sleep at night.



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