Web Site Issue.

[Brian Stevenson]

All, We had a problem with our DNS (Domain Name Services) records for the website.

Domain name services map Human readable web site addresses like https://www.vrra.ca/ to an ip address like 2345:0425:2CA1:0000:0000:0567:5673:23b5. It just makes it a little easier for us humans. You don’t want to remember all of those numbers

Our DNS Services are currently hosted by a small local company in Simcoe Ontario. The made some changes this morning and removed our CNAME from the DNS record. I have spoken with them and they are restoring the backup of all their records as we speak. It should be up again and soon as this is done. Normally it takes 5 minutes but the guy has to drive back into the office. I have no Idea how far away he lives from the office

I have already set up new DNS services in CloudFlare but didn’t get time to cut everything over before I left for business.

Its nice to support local companies but sometimes it just better to go with the Gorilla in the room like AWS, Cloudflare or Fastly. Sorry for the inconvenience

[Brian Stevenson]

BTW. This impacted over 1000 sites

[Brian Stevenson]

OK. Connectivity to the web site has been restored.

The web site was still running as it’s hosted in Cloudflare and not Kwik that hosts our DNS. The connection to it was broken

When you typed in http://www.vrra.ca in your browser it went to the DNS server to get the IP address as that’s what the browser needs to find the site. That record had been deleted, so the browser was returned a null record so when your browser went there nothing was present. The Browser then displays a “404 - Page Not Found” error.

If you had typed in the IP address you could have got to the web site. This basically just bypasses DNS.

There were around 1000 web sites in Southern Ontario impacted. Fortunately, we monitor our site using CompiraCloud so we knew about the issue within a few minutes and were able to escalate to Kwik

They agreed to give us credit for a month’s fees, it’s the least they can do.

Note that there are millions of DNS relay servers on the internet and the restored records must be propagated to all of them. If you are a Rogers or Bell customer this is almost instant. If you have a small rural internet service, it may take 5 or 10 minutes.

We have also tried to buy a ticket and were able to go right through to Pay Pal.