Technical glitch at Open DNS crashes hundreds of thousands of sites
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January 5, 2012
Thousands of websites crashed, went offline or were simply labelled as phishing sites yesterday following an apparent
technical glitch between OpenDNS and Google's Content Delivery Network (CDN).
The service outage lasted several hours before the issue was fixed. OpenDNS is a no-frills, online domain name lookup service, and it triggered the service outage by blocking access to
googleapis.com, Google's system of ready-made scripts and web applications for site developers.
According to various reports, a flood of DNS errors hit webpages that used Google-hosted jQuery and hundreds of thousands
of sites crashed as a result.
Visitors to websites were confronted with a message saying "Phishing site blocked. Phishing is a fraudulent attempt to get
you to provide personal information under false pretenses."
Other site visitors were greeted with a 404 error, IE, the dreaded '404 - file not found' message. The service outage
lasted for almost three hours.
And to make matters worse, as websites and their respective webmasters struggled to get back online, they employed fallback
scripts and re-routed traffic to Microsoft's rival CDN service.
The exact cause of the issues with OpenDNS seemed to be the googleapi.com security certificates. The fact that the problem
popped up suddenly yesterday would suggest that network admins at Google had been experimenting sporadically with SSL certificates
or made some other modification that conflicted directly with OpenDNS.
Google nor Open DNS weren't available for comment at the time of publication. One consequence of the DNS service outage
is that it would institute a system that sets Google as the default DNS provider, but would also switch to Microsoft's CDN
if Google's system drops out in future to save having to manually tweak web apps.
DNS or domain name system is the critical network of DNS servers all over the internet that automatically points browsers
at the correct hosting servers when given a human-readable address, such as cnn.com or abc.com, etc. Although all ISPs provide
their own (read: more reliable) DNS services for their customers, some users which aren't as knowledgeable still can opt to
use alternative DNS providers, such as OpenDNS.
But if reliablity, high availability and dependability is essential to an organization, site owners and webmasters should
always use the DNS servers provided by their hosting companies. Examples of such hosting providers that qualify for that high
level of service are Sun Hosting, Avantex and a few more.
In other IT industry news
Oracle, the world's second largest software company is starting to feel the effects of the current global recession,
as the database giant delivered lower second fiscal quarter numbers.
And those results are important to all the rest of the IT industry since Oracle is now considered like IBM and Microsoft--
if revenue is down for those three companies, they will most likely be lower for the rest of the industry as well.
For one thing, Oracle's global server sales dropped considerably, and new software license sales and renewals didn't
grow anywhere near what company CEO Larry Ellison had predicted in January of this year. And it's pretty much of the same
for most of the divisions at Oracle.
However, it's not all that gloomy. Sales of the company's line of Exadata and Exalogic servers were actually higher.
"Apple has over 30 Exadata server systems as they are building their cloud," Ellison said in a conference call.
Apple has been very secretive about the equipment that it installed inside its Maiden, North Carolina, data center
that it built early in the summer, and for obvious reasons.
For example, an Exadata X2-2 enterprise database system has eight two-socket servers, three QDR InfiniBand switches,
and fourteen Exadata storage arrays, complete with flash memory and special software to compress and preprocess large chunks
of data for database clusters.
Ellison did a lot of name dropping about who was buying the Exadata servers and how it was stealing away business from
IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
For example, the University of Melbourne acquired four new of its systems to run Fusion middleware, winning business away from competing Cisco blade servers running VMware virtualization.
Oracle's Exalogic servers run the company's implementation of the Xen hypervisor on a cluster and drops Fusion instances
on top of Oracle's Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration also acquired five Exalogic servers to sit between applications and the Exadata 11G
database clusters the agency already has installed.
Additionally consumer giant Amway tossed out IBM's Power Systems machines and put in two racks of Exalogic servers to act as the middleware layer supporting a mix of custom-designed and Oracle E-Business
Suite apps.
And Oracle won another IBM account, the Hyundai Motor Company which bought an Exalogic server as well.
Ellison added "I know that IBM is running a lot of ads saying that their servers run faster than ours, but I'd love to
see their customer references because we haven't seen one."
"We've seen a lot of ads, but no customer references. We have lots of customer references where we are replacing P-Series
IBM servers with our machines. I'd like to see at least one customer reference from IBM but so far I haven't seen any,"
added Ellison.
Ellison also said that a big European bank now had over 24 Exadata systems and that market research firm AC Nielsen had
moved part of its IT infrastructure off IBM servers and onto Oracle hardware and software.
Oracle also won four SAP customers, moving their databases from other systems to Exadata.
Ellison didn't specify what those prior systems were, but given the distribution of servers running SAP applications,
the likelihood is that it wasn't Sparc servers, but Hewlett-Packard Itanium or IBM Power Systems servers.
It will be interesting to observe what the next couple of quarters will be like, not just for Oracle as a company,
but for the rest of the IT industry. As usual, we will keep you posted on these and other news.
Source: Open DNS.
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