Indymedia Server Outages

national | indymedia ireland | news report Tuesday March 27, 2007 20:01 by Chekov - 1 of IMC

In the last few days, some users will have experienced trouble accessing the indymedia website. This was due to a problem with the domain's DNS configuration - the system which turns domain names (indymedia.ie) into computer addresses. We believe that we have now fixed the problem and we apologise for the service interruptions.

Technically, what happened was that our parent nameserver lacked a glue entry for our domain nameservers. This did not pose a problem as our nameservers were using an old reverse DNS name, which refered to a different domain. However, over the weekend, this DNS entry expired and, although we changed our DNS entries to the new hostname of our servers, we lacked a glue entry and so DNS servers were incapable of resolving the circular dependencies (the domain nameservers were on the domain itself).

We have now fixed the problem and we should hopefully not see any such outages again in the future. Due to the nature of DNS, a system that relies heavily on caching, changes can take up to 24 hours to propagate across the network, so it may take some time for some users to be able to view the site again. This propagation delay also makes it very tricky to debug DNS problems.

Our apologies again.