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It's been a crazy week.
Oct. 28th, 2005 02:00 pmThe dominant event has to have been Hurricane Wilma. "But," you say, "you live in Aurora, IL, about a thousand miles from Florida. How could Hurricane Wilma possibly impact you for 5 days from that distance?" Ha. More easily than you might think.
I am a web developer by trade. I am the primary responsible party for my employer's public websites and corporate intranet. I dabble in other things as well, but those are my primary responsibility. We host all of our websites on-premisis in Aurora. However, we do not host our own DNS. That responsibilty was contracted out to our former website host, who happens to be located in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.
DNS is what tells the rest of the internet how to find your website and email servers. It is what translates the "www.yournamehere.com" into the numeric (IP) address that really identifies your computer on the internet. Without DNS, your website and email address literally disappear from the rest of the internet: you cease to exist.
So I come into work on Monday morning and get an email from one of our CSRs: a customer called her to say that they couldn't get to their web portal to place an order. So I fire up my trusty web browser, type in the URL of the site... and it comes up just fine for me. OK. I type in the URL for one of our other sites and get the lovely message that the site couldn't be found. Hmm.
A little more investigating turns up that our DNS records have vanished. In fact, the ISP that hosts our DNS has vanished. *poof* As the day goes on, and cached information expires across the internet, we cease to exist on the information highway. No one can send us email; we can't send out email; our websites are gone. (I could still get to the one site because we had setup internal routing to the server.)
So we try to contact our ISP. It goes straight to voicemail. Email (from an external web-based account) is bounced: recipient unknown. They're just gone.
Last year, when Hurricane Frances went through that part of the world and forced a shutdown of our ISP for 3 days (over a weekend, though). They gave us advance notice then, and afterwards, they promised to put geographically diverse redundant servers and such in place so that the service interruption would never happen again—that was the only reason we agreed to renew our account with them.
So we basically spent the next two days going back-and-forth with Network Solutions to wrestle control of our domains, since they had been created initially through the ISP when we built the original sites (before I was an employee). We finally got things back up yesterday.
I suppose there is some good to come out of it all. It may make our upper management finally wake up and pay attention and give us some money to implement some disaster recovery strategies that we have been begging for for as long as I have been here (3 years in Feb.). And we will also consolidate all the varied accounts that Network Solutions has found reason to assign to our domains and all.
I'm not even going to get into the department meeting from hell from yesterday at this point. Suffice it to say that I am still exhausted from it and very glad that it's Friday and that we're not travelling anywhere this weekend.
"Find a happy place! Find a happy place!" —Pearl the Starfish, Finding Nemo
I am a web developer by trade. I am the primary responsible party for my employer's public websites and corporate intranet. I dabble in other things as well, but those are my primary responsibility. We host all of our websites on-premisis in Aurora. However, we do not host our own DNS. That responsibilty was contracted out to our former website host, who happens to be located in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.
DNS is what tells the rest of the internet how to find your website and email servers. It is what translates the "www.yournamehere.com" into the numeric (IP) address that really identifies your computer on the internet. Without DNS, your website and email address literally disappear from the rest of the internet: you cease to exist.
So I come into work on Monday morning and get an email from one of our CSRs: a customer called her to say that they couldn't get to their web portal to place an order. So I fire up my trusty web browser, type in the URL of the site... and it comes up just fine for me. OK. I type in the URL for one of our other sites and get the lovely message that the site couldn't be found. Hmm.
A little more investigating turns up that our DNS records have vanished. In fact, the ISP that hosts our DNS has vanished. *poof* As the day goes on, and cached information expires across the internet, we cease to exist on the information highway. No one can send us email; we can't send out email; our websites are gone. (I could still get to the one site because we had setup internal routing to the server.)
So we try to contact our ISP. It goes straight to voicemail. Email (from an external web-based account) is bounced: recipient unknown. They're just gone.
Last year, when Hurricane Frances went through that part of the world and forced a shutdown of our ISP for 3 days (over a weekend, though). They gave us advance notice then, and afterwards, they promised to put geographically diverse redundant servers and such in place so that the service interruption would never happen again—that was the only reason we agreed to renew our account with them.
So we basically spent the next two days going back-and-forth with Network Solutions to wrestle control of our domains, since they had been created initially through the ISP when we built the original sites (before I was an employee). We finally got things back up yesterday.
I suppose there is some good to come out of it all. It may make our upper management finally wake up and pay attention and give us some money to implement some disaster recovery strategies that we have been begging for for as long as I have been here (3 years in Feb.). And we will also consolidate all the varied accounts that Network Solutions has found reason to assign to our domains and all.
I'm not even going to get into the department meeting from hell from yesterday at this point. Suffice it to say that I am still exhausted from it and very glad that it's Friday and that we're not travelling anywhere this weekend.
"Find a happy place! Find a happy place!" —Pearl the Starfish, Finding Nemo
