Kevin’s Blog

Stupid IT Tricks: Myspace.com

Managing your company’s public DNS is serious business - a small typo or mistake can have serious consequences to your website, email, and other services.

For example, someone made what can only be assumed as a clueless mistake when updating their DNS - they added 127.0.0.1 to their records for the myspace.com. For those with weak network-fu, that is a special address which is only used for ‘localhost’ (your own computer). Since they had 5 hosts listed total, one out of five requests for their domain were going nowhere while this problem existed.

$ host -vv myspace.com
Trying “myspace.com”
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 24145
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;myspace.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.51
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.50
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.49
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.48
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 127.0.0.1

Received 109 bytes from 208.67.222.222#53 in 9 ms

I’m not sure why they’re still using round-robin DNS load balancing for their site with good ServerIron, Cisco, and F5 load balancers doing a much better job overall. We moved InfoWorld.com away from RRDNS years ago.

Fortunately either someone at MySpace noticed the issue quickly, or they saw the post at OpenDNS.com or on Digg and remedied the issue. But having such high TTLs in their DNS settings I’m sure the problem took a while to finally clear up completely.