back to article Missing dot sends Sweden tumbling off internet

Sweden effectively fell off the internet last night when maintenance to Domain Name Systems damaged every single .se web address. The problem happened at quarter to ten last night and took just less than an hour to fix. But some problems remained because the address data is cached externally by ISPs - these servers had to be …

COMMENTS

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  1. daz disley
    FAIL

    oops dot ess eee

    "IIF is investigating to see if its internal procedures need to be improved"

    errrrr, they took the whole country offline by mistake - what could possibly improve on that ????

  2. adnim

    Investigation into if?

    "IIF is investigating to see if its internal procedures need to be improved"

    Investigation into if not required, use the resources to work out how not if.

    /end smug

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    May I be to the first to Say

    What is the point of Sweden anyway

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Ouch

    I wouldn't like to be the keyboard jockey who gets the blame for that typo...

  5. Neil Greatorex
    Pirate

    So easy.....

    To break bits of this new fangled Interweb, but it's quite hard to break all of it.

    Please, please, can someone omit a trailing dot whilst updating the .com domain. Now that would be a fun-filled 60 minutes :-)

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Megaphone

    perhaps this explains the drop in P2P traffic?

    stop insisting on both a title and a comment

    and while I'm here, start showing the icons in the preview please, it ain't rocket science

  7. Iain 15
    Coffee/keyboard

    Conspiracy conspiracy conspiracy

    Mistake, my arse! Let us not forget that Sweden is the world leader in 'stealth' technology and infiltration gadgetry. I reckon this is a test of Sweden's new 'stealth' internet. They were in fact there all the time but the rest of the world COULDN'T SEE THEM! No doubt we will ALL shortly know EXACTLY what they were up to when the ransom demands start flooding in. For One MILLION dollars. Mawahaha.

    Always knew the Swedes were up to no good. No-one can be THAT inconspicuous by accident.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    "What is the point of Sweden anyway?"

    I am at work so I can't tell you.

  9. Mike007 Bronze badge

    hu?

    seems there had to be multiple failures here, for a start how did all of the DNS servers suffer at the same time? do they have it generate the zone once then replicate it automatically to all servers without any sort of sanity checks first? that's fine for a single website, but not for a TLD!

    (i've had a few domains that needed dynamic zone files, and they all did sanity checks on the secondaries before importing the zones, so a fault with the scripts generating the files wouldn't knock everything offline)

  10. Fazal Majid

    Amazing

    I didn't think anyone could top Network Solutions for incompetence, until today.

  11. mrlumpy
    Happy

    Yay!!! It's not just me that does this then!

    I've done this about 3 times in 2 years, not block out Sweden but miss a trailing dot in a dns file when updating dns entries. It is a bit of a timebomb that hits about 5 hours later on our network and causes a fair old bit of fun until dmesg shows where I have gone wrong.

    You can't beat good old fashioned 'uman error! Not just lusers who have pebcak issues.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    @AC 18:57

    Saabs and political arrogance.

  13. Robert Heffernan
    FAIL

    Why?

    Why does the DNS software not recognise there is a dot missing and either spew out a rather visible error, or just add the dot anyway!

    Fail: Cos DNS need a major rethink!

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Haha

    No blonde bimbos for you then!

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    @David W

    Apart from Saab is owned by a bunch of yanks, soon to be owned by a bunch of Norwegiens....

  16. Lord Raa
    Black Helicopters

    Are we sure

    Are we sure that it wasn't the work of that hidden enclave of lesbians China reported recently?

  17. TeeCee Gold badge
    Unhappy

    @David W.

    You forgot flat-pack furniture.

    Oh and Abba of course. We mustn't forget Abba. In fact I think it's illegal to forget Abba or something like that. Every time I get close to the nirvana of completely forgetting them, some complete bastard releases a film, play or compilation CD or there's some kind of "n years of Abba" event splattered all over the airwaves to remind me.

    This time some so-and-so asked what the point of bloody Sweden was and there they bloody were, brought unbidden to mind by association. Another day of cheery, bouncy, crap tunes revolving round my mind. Damn.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    @perhaps this explains the drop in P2P traffic? #

    Dont be Daft! This is a domain related issue whereas P2P usually doesn't bother with domains.. It normally goes straight to IP's

  19. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    How hard is it to check the file?

    Many applications are able to check their data file formats and warn of potential errors; how hard would this be to do for the DNS zone files? <tongue-in-cheek>Maybe its not too big a problem if it does go wrong now and again?</tongue-in-cheek>

  20. peter 5 Silver badge
    Alert

    DNS trailing dot (FYI)

    For those who've not set up a domain - it's a relative path. So writing "somewhere.se" (no trailing dot) when you meant "somewhere.se." (trailing dot) is like writing "root" instead of "/root" or "Windows" instead of "C:\Windows": the paths are potentially valid but unlikely to be what you intended.

  21. Stephen Baines

    Urgh!

    Caused me lots of fun. My servers have .se addresses, and suddenly failed sanity checks and fell over.

  22. Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse
    FAIL

    Brilliant!!!

    "The firm's testing procedures did not pick this up."

    I'm guessing a test script for this was ommitted as they thought that no-one could ever be that dumb as to miss out a '.'

    How does a Swede say "Oops..."?

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    @How does a Swede say "Oops..."?

    Dunno, but this is how they make donuts:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbs64GvGgPU

  24. Peter Mc Aulay
    FAIL

    Epic fail

    Every newbie DNS admin has made this mistake at least once, I wager. Taking out an entire TLD this way is a little better than most of us get the opportunity to do, of course - and it speaks volumes of quality control and management at the IFF. Entries in zone files have had periods at the end for at least 22 years, sheesh.

  25. kain preacher

    Imagine

    If this happened in Japan or China.

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