Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by traviswingo 3744 days ago
Yeah this is pretty unfortunate. We have some big investor meetings today and this unfortunately took our marketing site offline. Hopefully they resolve this soon - it's the first time we've ever experienced an issue with their service.

We really need fail-overs in place...small team problems.
2 comments
brndn 3744 days ago
If you are showing a demo or something, you can still navigate to your DO IP address. Of course, I don't know if other things (images, etc.) on your website also rely on their DNS.
link
Maakuth 3744 days ago
For that kind of emergency, you can point the domain name to the IP address via /etc/hosts (there's a similar file in Windows as well).
link
tracker1 3744 days ago
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
link
defenestration 3744 days ago
We feel the pain as well as our platform is unreachable. I'm now using an other DNS server and changed the nameserver in the domain-record. However the DNS propagation is taking some time. What are you doing at the moment as fail-over?
link
pbhjpbhj 3744 days ago
Sorry if I'm trying to "teach grandma to suck eggs" but can't you just enter the domain in your local hosts file. If it's a network that needs access then presumably you have some sort of proxy/cache that could be seeded with the necessary domain+IP pairing? I suppose these aren't possible if you're trying to demo on someone else's network or in a public space or such.
link
traviswingo 3744 days ago
We just switched it over to Route53 and set up some fail-overs there. Took us 5 mins and we're back online.

Looks like DO is still offline so it seems to have been a good call...

link
scurvy 3744 days ago
You're back online from your perspective. What about all the name servers that have your SOA cached still looking at DO? You're still down for them.
link
traviswingo 3744 days ago
Tough shit, lol. We now have reduced TTL times for future occurrences, but there's nothing we can do for those users who are still experiencing an outage.
link
scurvy 3744 days ago
Minimum TTL for SOA records on .com is a day. Lowering your A record TTL isn't buying you much in case of DNS hosting failure. Helpful if your site (not dns) needs to move providers though.
link