[LINK] Fwd: Census Config [Was: Personal comments on the eCensus form]

[Glen Turner]

Kim Holburn wrote:
> Surprising that there are two nameservers for census.abs.gov.au and they 
> are both on the same subnet

Sad, although that IBM network is attached to both Optus and
Telstra.

The nameservers are round-robining DNS answers across the
down-stream machines. They've dropped the TTL right down
probably as a way of dealing with an outage of one of the
machines (as opposed to having all the machines holding all
of the IP addresses, and using OSPF metrics to spread the
traffic across all four machines in normal operation).

That low TTL is a problem, as it is leading to lots of DNS
traffic. DNS traffic is actually more sensitive to loss
than TCP traffic, so they've undermined their resiliency
by that design choice.

Also, there seems to be no escalation path for ISP helpdesks
to level 2 support at the ABS.  I lodged a fault at 6pm last
night and I'm still waiting for a response, 16 hours later.

-- 
  Glen Turner         Tel: (08) 8303 3936 or +61 8 8303 3936
  Australia's Academic & Research Network  www.aarnet.edu.au