DNS service was interrupted to our ns1.sonic.net name server cluster at 5pm PST for approximately 10 minutes.
All service has been restored and we are investigating the root cause of the problem.
–Augie
Update: Another brief service interruption today ( 21 March ) at 4:31pm PST for approximately 7 minutes as we were updating our name servers. Service was restored at 4:38pm PST.
Today at 3:45pm PST we suffered a DNS outage to one of our two DNS clusters, service was restored to the cluster at 3:51pm.
All services are functioning as expected at this time, and we are investigating the cause of the outage.
–Augie
On Tuesday February 26th we will begin the roll out of several security enhancements to our recursive DNS servers. These features will keep both our customers and our systems more secure and limit abuse of our resources. The changes include:
Enabling DNSSEC validation.
Enabling 2 commercial DNS RPZ services.
Closing our DNS servers to off network requests.
These changes will be rolled out to customers served out of Los Angeles first. Provided that we don’t run into any major issues, the remaining systems serving the rest of our customers will be migrated on March 5th.
Due to the potentially controversial nature of using DNS RPZ, a set of alternate servers are available to customers who wish to opt out. For more information please visit the following Forums posting:
https://forums.sonic.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1186
Update 26, February — Stage one is complete, Los Angeles customers are now using the new DNS services.
The DNSSEC servers provided by Sonic.net are not in any way supported by our Technical Support team, they are available as a “labs” project for advanced customers only.
We have deployed a new set of DNS servers for our customers to use if they want the added protection of DNSSEC while they surf the Internet, these new servers are made available as an advanced option, and are in no way meant to replace our existing DNS servers — in other words: proceed with caution, and do not proceed unless you feel confident in doing so.
Sonic.net believes this service will help keep our customers more secure as they surf the Internet, and that by offering this service we are helping support wide-spread adoption of DNSSEC across the Internet.
For more information, please visit our Wiki page :
https://wiki.sonic.net/wiki/DNSSEC .
Please submit comments, questions, or concerns to the “Labs” section of our Forums, a thread on this topic has already been started here:
Starting today ( 8, Feb ) the name servers we hand out to our customers for DNS resolution ( ns1.sonic.net and ns2.sonic.net ) are going to be updated to exclude authoritative data, and be recursive only name servers.
This means that our name servers will behave more like other name servers on the Internet, prior to this change you may have received confusing results when asking our name server for a domain name, and asking Google’s open recursive DNS servers ( for example ) — now you will receive the same results.
Note: customers do not need to update their DNS resolver settings.
–Augie
Our authoritative name servers have had IPv6 addresses for some time now but until earlier today our glue records did not list the server’s AAAA addresses. Support for IPv6 on our authoritative name servers is now complete. However, it is worth noting that v6 requests account for <0.1% of our total authoritative DNS requests. Customer’s with their own registered name servers (you run your own DNS servers) that are IPv6 ready may submit requests to have their glue records manually updated to include their AAAA records. -Kelsey
Beginning at 11:51 AM we began experiencing problems with queries to www.sonic.net and some of our name based hosted customers. During this time, customers may have experienced intermittent connection errors. We have determined the problem to be a hardware problem with one of our load balancers. Because of the nature and obscurity of the problem, the period in which there was delay or question refusals is estimated at 20-24 minutes. We apologize for this unexpected downtime. Service has since been restored to full normal operation. –Don, Augie, and the SOC
Yesterday we completed an upgrade of our recursive DNS clusters (what you see as ns1.sonic.net and ns2.sonic.net).
This upgrade gives those DNS servers a substantial performance boost and enables them to handle the ever increasing ammout of requests that they see.
DNS is core to the Internet experience — without it : E-mail ceases to function, and surfing your favorite web-sites is impossible; it is because of this that we have always made DNS a priority in our infrastructure and are very proud of our ability to stay available even during times of high traffic and maintenance.
— Augie and Don.
We have added the ability for our customers to edit their Reverse DNS in our DNS Editor Member Tool:
https://members.sonic.net/websites/nameservers/host_records
This tool works for anyone with IP Address services with us; be it Colocation, Leased Server, DSL, or anything else with an IP address tied to it; you can now use this tool to assign the corresponding DNS records to those addresses.
This feature is most useful to those running their own mail servers and can also be of use to those people who want both the forward and reverse of their domain name to match.
a.auth-ns.sonic.net and b.auth-ns.sonic.net are now fully IPv6 enabled for answering authoritative DNS requests over IPv6. While IPv6 is still a long way off from widespread deployment we are seeing more and more services becoming available via IPv6.
Sonic.net has provided IPv6 tunnel services to all broadband connected customers since April of 2003. For more information check out http://sonic.net/features/ipv6 or head straight to our membertools to setup your tunnel today.