Bug of the Month

The Man With No Domain Name

Jason K. Krause

Dennis Gaughan must have looked forlorn, standing in the pouring rain, pounding on Network Solutions' door and pleading with security to put him in touch with tech support. But what else was there to do? His domain name was gone.

Sometime Saturday afternoon, August 2, WebCom, a Web and e-mail service that hosts Gaughan's intranet site, had its domain name removed from the root servers of Network Solutions, which manages the domain-registration system for the Internet. The source of the problem was a bug in a script that Network Solutions was running over the weekend while cleaning its databases, erroneously deactivating WebCom's domain. In the aftermath of the crash, WebCom, which is based in California, was unab le to contact Herndon, Virginia-based Network Solutions to find out what had happened. Many analysts say the WebCom incident is yet another in a string of snafus that highlight the Internet's immaturity for hosting bet-your-business applications.

"Network Solutions is a single point of failure for the Internet, yet there's no 24-hour hot line to contact them if something goes down," says Thomas Leavitt, executive vice president of WebCom. Network Solutions claims to have a direct line for contacting system administrators at any time, but it's not a general hot line, and company officials asked BYTE not to publish the number for the general public. Leavitt was unaware of this number at the time that his Web site went down.

In the wake of the domain-name crisis, WebCom officials were able to find a WebCom user, Gaughan, who lived in the same area as Network Solutions' facilities. "I went to Network Solutions' facility in Herndon," says Gaughan. "I knew it wasn't the InterNIC engineering center, just an administrative office, but I wanted to get their security to put me in touch with someone who could help."

Gaughan's confrontation with security happened to coincide with the first thunderstorm in the area in 3-1/2 months, and he got soaked for his efforts, but Network Solutions called in some staff members and ran an emergency regeneration of the root server Zone file to restore accessibility of WebCom's domain.

Send yours to jason_krause@mgh.com