Autarchy of the Private Cave

As mentioned here and here, XName is a popular DDoS target.

Although I did enhance reliability of my other domains with a total of 3 secondaries, I forgot to do so with the most visited bogdan.org.ua. Thus, when yesterday bogdan.org.ua stopped resolving from ns0 and ns1 of XName, the site actually became unaccessible. Other XName-hosted domains, but with more secondaries, are resolving finely even 24 hours after the primary ns failure…

Little research based on the list of free DNS services helped me find this comparison, and made me think this way:

• zoneedit has 18 servers, but had very unfavourable user feedback from it’s users
• everydns has 4 servers and very good user feedback
• editdns has 3 servers, could be a backup
• xname has only 2

There is also freedns.afraid.org, but there was nothing substantial about this service I could find (except for the note that if you’re using one of their subdomains, it might not be visible to Google).

To remedy the problem, yesterday I modified the domain record to contain two more NS. This seems to have helped now. I suspect that I’ll remove XName’s secondary NS from the record, and will replace it with some other secondary NS, and then add one more secondary to get a total of 5 independent NS for the domain.

Update: according to my blog uptime monitor, total domain downtime exceeds 33 hours. Problems started yesterday with two short downtimes (33 and 38 minutes), then domain name went down for 32 hours. Now domain is up, but that could be only because of adding more non-XName secondaries.

Update 2:

XName infrastructure was under heavy attack since friday 8PM (GMT+2).
Until sunday 1PM, despite efforts of our different transit providers, www , ns0, and our internal mail server were unreachable. ns1 was reachable, but not very responsive (about 30% of DNS requests were answered). ns2 was unaffected.
From Sunday 1PM to monday 3AM, ns0 was reachable with a responsiveness of about 50%. ns1 was fully responsive, as ns2. www and internal mail were still heavily affected.

Today my blog’s domain bogdan.org.ua isn’t resolving to IP address from several worldwide locations. The trouble seems to be with XName, as running nslookup using ns?.xname.org gives me this:

DNS server handling your query: ns1.xname.org
DNS server’s address: 87.98.164.164#53

** server can’t find bogdan.org.ua: SERVFAIL

It’s rather strange that all the other domains I have on XName are functioning properly.

I can’t figure out the reason behind the problem; will keep trying to resolve as soon as possible.

Update: this is in fact XName-related problem: they are again under DDoS attack.

The other domains I have at XName might have stayed unaffected thanks to the secondary nameservers; it might have been just the question of the difference in sync times, that caused bogdan.org.ua to expire earlier than other domains.

It’s a great pity that DDoS attack organizers cannot (yet) be reliably tracked and then punished. Attacking a free web service cannot be explained other than by mental sickness or noticeable loss of profit by some entities…

Information taken from: freedom.org.ru

1. www.zoneedit.com; 5 names; A, MX, NS; mail forwarding, web forwarding
2. www.everydns.net; 20 names; A, MX, NS; web forwarding, dynamic domains
3. www.dnspark.com; 3 names; A, MX, NS; web forwarding, mail forwarding, backup MX
4. www.domain-dns.com; unlimited names; A, MX; web forwarding, paid mail forwarding
5. www.xname.org; no limit; A, MX, NS (I keep several domains there; quite good as for a free service)
6. primaryns.kiev.ua (UA-IX only); unlimited names; A, MX, NS; primary only
7. secondary.net.ua; unlimited names; secondary only
8. ns2.trifle.net; unlimited names; secondary only
9. FreeDNS.ws (suggested in comments; looks promising – I now have one domain there)