An hour or so ago, I tried to check a Wikipedia entry and my browser told me it couldn't find en.wikipedia.org.  Surely that's wrong, I thought, but pushed "Check Wikipedia" onto the stack and went on to something else.  Then, coincidentally, while searching for DNS-related news articles to inspire my next blog entry, I ran across this one from PC Magazine.  Turns out Wikipedia's European data center had an overheating problem that caused many of their servers to shut down in an act of self-preservation.  To shunt European traffic to their servers in Florida, they enacted their failure procedure, which modifies their DNS records.

Unfortunately, that failover mechanism was broken (they didn't specify how), and broken so badly that it interrupted DNS resolution for all Wikimedia sites globally.  While they quickly recognized and fixed the problem, it took as long as an hour for the corrected data to propagate because of TTLs.

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According to Wired, Symbolics.COM was registered on March 15, 1985.  Symbolics.COM was the very first subdomain of COM, making today the silver anniversary of, well, something.  The first delegation from .COM, I guess.  Since then, there have been tens of millions more, of course, so the very firstought to be significant.

I had the privilege of managing the 9th-oldest subdomain of .COM, HP.COM, for several years back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  That job set me on the path I've been on for the last twenty-something years, and for that I'm very grateful.

What else has happened during those 25 years?  Countless versions of the BIND name server were released, from BIND 4.8 to the current 9.7.0.  For that, we owe the Internet Systems Consortium an enormous debt of gratitude.  BIND still powers, by our last measure, almost 75% of the authoritative name servers serving subzones of .COM, .NET and .ORG.  Commercial ventures with that kind of market share make people rich; the folks at ISC chose instead to pursue the nobler goal of producing the reference implementation of the Domain Name System, thereby facilitating the remarkable growth and success of the Internet.

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