That's one way to solve your problems...

[crschmidt]

So, last night around 10pm, LiveJournal stopped working for me (and pretty much everyone else, apparently). I played around a bit, and realized that the problem was with the DNS servers -- the LiveJournal servers themselves worked fine. opal1159 was wonderful enough to let me know the IP of LiveJournal -- 66.150.66.50 obviously doesn't work anymore ;) With the appropriate IP in /etc/hosts, everything worked fine.

So I added that to /etc/hosts, then played a bit and realized that LiveJournal.org's DNS was on the same servers as LiveJournal.com's -- the result being that the status.livejournal.org page was equally dead. I was kind of curious as to why someone wouldn't have thought of moving the DNS for that domain to at least have a secondary nameserver in some other place -- LJ used to do that by using a DNS server running on ns2.bradfitz.com or something like that as a backup.

So, after the lj-maint post (and reading some of the comments by crucially) I decided to check out the whois for LiveJournal again:

Domain Name Servers:
NS.LAYER42.NET
USW2.AKAM.NET
EUR1.AKAM.NET
ASIA2.AKAM.NET
NS1-118.AKAM.NET
NS1-142.AKAM.NET
USE3.AKAM.NET
USW7.AKAM.NET
AUS1.AKAM.NET

Yes, I suppose that switching your DNS service to be run by akamai would be *one* way to avoid a DDoS on your nameservers...

Comments

[catyak]

Not if you can't resolve the DNS in the first place. My first port of call would be the headers of email comment notifications, I think they arrive from the same IP address.

D

[opal1159.livejournal.com]

That's what I thought, but I tried it anyway (during the downtime) and the Terminal gave it to me. (Are these things ever cached maybe?)

[catyak]

Yes, it'll be cached in various DNS servers for some time. When the cache expires, it'll go look for the value again, and that's the point at which you'll lose out.

D