You are here

Home › community › blogs ›

.coop domain issues

Submitted by Paul Dale Smith on 4 October, 2011 - 00:00

Yesterday saw connection problems for UK-based users of .coop domains. Many co-operatives found that their websites would not load up in the morning, and the problem was quickly traced to the DNS resolution - the link between a website's name and the computer that hosts it.

This problem was resolved early in the day, but unfortunately recurred and meant that by 4pm many .coop website were unavailable to visitors based in the UK.

However, by 9pm last night the problem had been traced and resolved, and this morning all .coop customers should find their sites available and working again. Any members who are still having problems should contact Paul Dale Smith for further assistance.

Co-operatives UK would like to apologise to all our .coop customers who were affected by this problem, and give our thanks to our partners in www.uk.domains.coop for their hard work in resolving this issue.

Groups audience: 
Members of Co-operatives UK
tags: 
co-operatives
website
Blogs

Comments

Submitted by Paul Dale Smith on 5 October, 2011 - 11:40

Was this a problem with domains.coop's DNS servers? As far as we saw, domains sold by software.coop kept working fine last night (and we were in the office dealing with a server problem that affected only one client).If it was a problem with domains.coop DNS servers, are you asking why they seem to have four nameserver groups but they seem to be in only two subnets and all with one provider? After all, part of the point of having multiple nameservers is to put them on different subnets and different providers so that the failure of one network or provider doesn't completely wipe them out. Four nameserver groups looks nice but it's false comfort if they're all at the facilities of one provider.This comment was posted by user MJ Ray: it has had to be recreated from an offline record due to a technical issue.

Submitted by Paul Dale Smith on 5 October, 2011 - 11:42

It may help to cast a bit of light on this issue by providing a little more information. The DNS servers we use came under a DDOS (Distributed Denail of Service) attack in the early hours on Monday 3 Oct. This was dealt with very promptly and the servers were fully operational form about 9.15 am UK time. Later that same day we saw additional problems arising, possibly as a result of the earlier attack, whereby a number of UK customers were unable to reach the DNS servers (and so could not access their email or websites). This was not a blanket approach as only a small number of reports came in from UK cutomers, and the issue did not appear to affect customers outside of the UK. Nor was the issue specific to .coop domain name users. I am also aware of UK customers that have been totally unaffected by this issue (it may be related to ISP and/or geographical location).Today - Oct 4, I am awaiting more information from our DNS provider as to what has been happening, and the steps they have taken and are taking. The latest information I have is that they are still working very hard, as they have been for the last 24 hours and more, to mitigate what appears to be an ongoing DDOS attack, in the order of 200Mbps, whilst aiming to keep our DNs service responding effectively to legitimate requests.Oh, and in response to the query raised by @mjray, yes our nameservers are fully compliant with best practice and are geographically and topologically distributed.This comment was posted to the site by user Graham Mitchell. It has had to be recreated from an offline record due to a technical failure.

Submitted by mjray on 5 October, 2011 - 12:03

Sorry to hear about the DDoS. Those are never fun, or easy to fix.They may be topologically distributed, but my question was more: are they institutionally distributed? They look like they're all on netblocks belonging to one provider.

Submitted by Graham on 9 October, 2011 - 08:31

Our nameservers are all with one provider. We believe this makes for a more efficient arrangement. There is a balance to be struck on this issue - we have struck that balce to best suit our particular context and requirements.

Submitted by Travis Weller on 9 October, 2011 - 23:56

Hmm. As of Sunday 6pm CDT all services for the newmusic.coop domain are still not working. I submitted reports of this last week and still have not received a reply to them (Yes, I used a different email address). I started googling in desperation and found this site. And your contact link up there seems to be broken.

Submitted by Paul Dale Smith on 10 October, 2011 - 08:31

As you're based in the US, I don't think there's much we can do to help you: who did you register the .coop address with?

Submitted by Travis Weller on 10 October, 2011 - 14:16

My original registrar was in the UK (domains.coop) a few years back -- when the domain extension was quite new. I haven't changed registrars. Everything was working fine until last week when suddenly DNS service is intermittant.

Submitted by Paul Dale Smith on 10 October, 2011 - 14:23

Okay, if it was uk.domains.coop then we should be able to find out what's going on. Graham (who has commented below) manages uk.domains.coop on our behalf, so I'll ask him to contact you ASAP.

Submitted by Graham on 10 October, 2011 - 16:57

TravisThanks for posting here. We did receive your support email late Friday night. As we formally work Monday to Friday (although I'll often find myself doing stuff at weekends) we don't guarantee to respond over a weekend. I've since replied directly, but it's worth just restating that your domain is configured to use third-party DNS, so the issues we saw last week, which were fully resolved by Oct 6, would not have affected your domain (unless you have only just switched nameservers). Do come back to me via support.uk@domains.coop if I can help further.

Search form

#coops Twitter

Co-operatives UK Limited, Holyoake House, Hanover Street, Manchester, M60 0AS.
Registered in England as an Industrial and Provident Society under the Industrial and Provident Societies Act 1965. Registered no. 2783R.