Thursday, January 12, 2012

Hackerne.ws DNS temporarily broken

If you're going to update DNS, use a tool that sanity checks your configuration as well as running your zones in a sandbox before deploying them. Otherwise this happens and your site goes down:

willisp@darkstar ~/ $ dig hackerne.ws

; <<>> DiG 9.4-ESV-R4 <<>> hackerne.ws
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 43879
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;hackerne.ws. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
hackerne.ws. 16 IN CNAME 174.132.225.106.

;; Query time: 80 msec
;; SERVER: 150.123.71.14#53(150.123.71.14)
;; WHEN: Thu Jan 12 09:57:05 2012
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 58

They soon fixed the problem so i'm not trying to give them too hard a time, but it's a good lesson in why even modest sites should do quality control for all production-touching changes. Unless you're really familiar with DNS the above mistake might get overlooked quickly while troubleshooting.