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dw_maintenance2014-09-04 02:14 pm
DNS change today
Hi all,
We had a brief outage this morning. The cause was an (unexpected) policy change by our DNS provider, Dyn, deciding to shut us off. They had to roll back the change for unrelated reasons so we were back online, but it does mean that we need to migrate off of their service.
ETA: The policy change was that, for about 10 years now -- as long as I've been using Dyn! -- they had no usage/quota limits on their DNS service. Given that DNS requests are tiny and easy to serve, this made sense. They made a business decision recently to establish some (rather tiny) quotas. We're ... quite in excess of them (by some 15,000%) and we don't want to pay in excess of $500 USD/month for DNS service. Amazon's price is 10% of that. They probably tried to contact us, but I don't recall seeing any emails. Anyway, that's it; it's nothing particularly nefarious.
We will be moving our DNS service to Amazon's Route53 service. This kind of migration is fairly easy technically, but if there are problems it will probably mean Dreamwidth will be offline until they can be resolved. And, given the nature of how DNS works, it means that any outage will probably be measured in hours rather than minutes.
I've done my best to ensure that the changeover will go smoothly. If anything happens, though, we'll be on our dreamwidth account to keep everybody apprised of the progress.
The switch will be flipped around 3:30pm PDT / 2230 UTC today, this is in about 90 minutes.
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(Was it the fan fic? It's always the fan fic.)
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Now I am wondering what percentage of DW's hits per month are smut-related.
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I don't understand 'queries'. Is that making a support request, or just posting a comment? I'm thinking, posting a comment = "asking" the system to let it through? But I know zippo about the workings of the internet.
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DNS is the phone book of the Internet, basically.
When you type in 'dreamwidth.org' in your browser, your computer has to actually figure out -where- Dreamwidth is. It uses DNS to do that. So, a 'query' happens every time a computer asks the DNS servers 'hey, where is this "dreamwidth.org" I hear about?' and then the servers respond with an IP address (an Internet phone number).
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Thank you; I appreciate the explanation.
(I see Denise explained to someone else, but I didn't grok that 'where is this' = 'query'. My 'duh' moment for the day.)
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When you put, say, "www.dreamwidth.org" into your web browser, your ISP sometimes has to look up where that address lives on the internet -- like if you had a business's name, and needed to know their address, so you looked them up in the phone book. One "hey, where does this site live" = one query. Now, your ISP remembers addresses for a little while, so it's not "one page load = one DNS query", but your ISP is also paranoid about people moving without telling it, so it looks up addresses pretty frequently!
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A reply from Mark and Denise! I feel special. </snicker>
Thank you; that makes a lot of sense. One of my favorite things about DW (among so many) is how the tech folks manage to explain things in simple terms for those who are very non-tech.
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