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„My e-mail is not working!“ „What happened?“ „Has something changed?“ On April 12 midafternoon found our already perspiring and slightly irritated IT administrator peppered with questions, interrupting the installation of forty new workstations.

While panicky colleagues stared at their computer screens, our IT admin began rummaging through various log files and trouble shooting his own system (you always look for the beam in your own eye first - at least some people do) but he found nothing wrong. He did, however, find something interesting on the www.heise.de website.

There the news ticker read: „Currently the top-level-domain. de is gradually dropping out. Obviously this is due to the fact that at times the responsible server at the .de-registry DeNIC answers DNS-enquiries at times incorrectly - and sometimes not at all; the zone-files seem to provide incomprehensible information or none at all. The only reason some de-servers are still accessible for certain users with their DNS-name at all is due to the caches of the DNS-servers at the internet providers.“

In plain English: „When the name www.monta.de is broken down into the ‚interactive hieroglyphics‘ (a series of numbers and letters), first the DNSRoot- Server is asked who is responsible for the „de“ domain. Then it searches for „monta.de“ and finally, for „www.monta.de“. As no useful reply came in the second step, there was a failure. The DeNIC replied with „a malfunction of several .de-name-servers can be detected“. The problem will be investigated and further information regarding the current state will be given as soon as available.

Summary: It’s Not Always the IT-Admin’s Fault

Thirty minutes later, the DNS-server at the DeNIC resumed and everything was operating normally again, as if nothing had ever happened. E-mails were sent and received and all was right with the world.

At this point: a collective “sorry !! and thank you” - also in the name of all colleagues – to our admin Johannes Holzer, who manages to solve all IT-problems (also the ones, he does not cause himself).

PS: Please contact your admin in order to receive explanations of all technical expressions used

(BT)