[Community-Discuss] AfriNIC whois servers down

[Andrew Alston]

Dear Afrinic,

As a followup question - can AFRINIC please explain to me how the status page is showing all operational - when in fact - both web and whois servers were offline and down.

This is EXTREMELY concerning - since it means that not only do we have things down that are critical to this community - but the page that is meant to tell us if there is a problem - is malfunctioning to report no errors.

Andrew


From: Andrew Alston <Andrew.Alston at liquidtelecom.com>
Sent: 05 February 2019 09:53
To: General Discussions of AFRINIC <community-discuss at afrinic.net>
Cc: service-support at afrinic.net; hostmaster at afrinic.net
Subject: [Community-Discuss] AfriNIC whois servers down
Importance: High

Hi AfriNIC Community,

I am deliberately posting this to the community mailing list - since this issue affects *everyone* and is not a isolated issue that I will send via a normal ticket (though I have copied in AfriNIC support as well)

I noticed this morning that AFRINIC whois servers are not responding - and we are getting timeouts to these servers.  My first thought was that this may be some kinda issue from our side (routing or something), but have since verified this with 4 other unrelated providers - all seeing the same issue.

Now - I understand maintenance - and I understand outages - however - whois servers are actually a pretty critical piece of infrastructure - so I have three questions


  1.  When will this be fixed
  2.  Why was this community not informed of an outage to these servers the moment it happened
  3.  What are the redundancies in place for these servers considering that amongst other things - the route object database is accessed via this mechanism - which makes this critical to generation of filters and other such things - and I notice that both servers sit on a single subnet - that almost certainly sits in the same geographic location.
  4.  Considering that this community puts enough emphasis on whois data to restrict RDNS to subnets that are not assigned (and hence in whois) - it is incumbent on AFRINIC to keep these servers functional!

I look forward to prompt answers

Andrew

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