Section 5 of 5
Where it actually breaks
The misconfigurations behind real outages.
Real outages are rarely exotic. Four pieces on the misconfigurations behind most of them, all four visible from outside the organisation that caused them.
4 pieces in this section
- 01Lame delegationA parent points at a server that will not answer for the zone, and everything below it goes quiet.
- 02Missing glueWhen the nameserver lives inside the zone it serves, the parent has to carry its address or the chain cannot start.
- 03The serial that never incrementedSecondaries only pull when the number goes up, so an edit that forgets it never leaves the primary.
- 04Expired at the registrarThe commonest total outage has nothing to do with the servers at all.