Mit.edu is down | Hacker News Reader

Mit.edu is down

mit.edu

87 pointssimonster45 comments

Hi there! We know MITnet is down, and we're pretty sure its an issue with BGP. We've been having issues periodically over the past few weeks, and this is almost certainly not the result of an attack, just network misconfiguration.

-- Luke from MIT SIPB

Confusing timing eh?

Is there a particular reason why Google servers are still accessible from within MIT despite MITnet being down?

Google peers directly with MIT, so connections there do not have to go to the public internet.

> Is there a particular reason why Google servers are still accessible from within MIT despite MITnet being down?

Google and MIT have a network peering arrangement.

How long do you estimate until the Internet will be back up? Thank you.

Some things are back now. Still not mit.edu

Not to worry, they'll probably begin the actual attack as soon as you get everything fixed :)

3down needs an update. it is borderline useless in situations like these.

Even now, when service is back, the most recent entry on 3down is from December 31.

MIT should have a twitter, right?

To be clear, MIT SIPB maintains services at MIT, but does not maintain MIT's network. Further details as to the root cause are forthcoming.

It is not clear whether this was an attack or not.

MIT's name servers are all on their own network? Seriously?

  ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
  mit.edu.              172800  IN      NS      bitsy.mit.edu.
  mit.edu.              172800  IN      NS      strawb.mit.edu.
  mit.edu.              172800  IN      NS      w20ns.mit.edu.
  
  ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
  bitsy.mit.edu.                172800  IN      A       18.72.0.3
  strawb.mit.edu.               172800  IN      A       18.71.0.151
  w20ns.mit.edu.                172800  IN      A       18.70.0.160

It's not that uncommon if they're multi-homed. Of course, I'm not saying that an additional external DNS won't be nice.

MIT owns the entire 18. /8 subnet.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addres...

RFC compliant dns

From here in the Midwest USA, here's the last few lines of "mtr mit.edu --report":

  16.|-- ae-1-8.bar2.Boston1.Level 90.0%  10  83.3  83.3  83.3  83.3  0.0
  17.|-- ae-0-11.bar1.Boston1.Leve  0.0%  10  84.5  84.0  82.5  85.0  0.7
  18.|-- ae-7-7.car1.Boston1.Level  0.0%  10  83.1  83.9  81.8  92.9  3.2
  19.|-- MASSACHUSET.car1.Boston1.  0.0%  10  85.1  83.7  82.3  85.1  0.9
  20.|-- DMZ-RTR-2-EXTERNAL-RTR-1.  0.0%  10  89.9  88.8  86.1  94.2  2.9
  21.|-- ???                       100.0  10   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0  0.0

(the full name for the last listed host is "DMZ-RTR-2-EXTERNAL-RTR-1.MIT.EDU")

Traceroute to web.mit.edu (previously 18.9.22.69) dies after a Level 3 router in Boston. This isn't just DNS, although both MIT.edu and DoJ.gov are returning NXDOMAIN right now.

Justice.gov and USDoJ.gov are functioning normally, though.

I can't even ping them. MIT has huge pipes to the Internet. Someone has to be throwing a lot of bandwidth at them from very very close to choke them off, or has specifically attacked their routers.

Very disappointed if it's DDoS. This doesn't feel like the time for it.

Is this the result of some kind of organized DDoS (Anonymous or some other hacktivist group), or merely a coincidence given their recent exposure re: aaronsw?

It's back up now, so if it was a DDoS it was a pretty ineffectual one (time between post and this comment is 20 minutes).

W3.org still appears to be down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5052503

Still down for me. (I can't access the website, my MIT email, or my box sitting on campus.) http://3down.mit.edu/ works but reports nothing.

All .mit.edu domains I've tried appear down (stellar, my fraternity, etc)

its still down and so is w3.org

Still down here (accessing from the UK in case that matters).

Still down.

still down

Still down, from Asia (Taiwan) DNS resolution issue

According to this[1], it's just networking issues.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5052903

MIT's been having serious intermittent network problems over the past two weeks, although usually not a complete outage from all parts of the Internet (there were several points last week where it was reachable from Internet2 but not from a handful of residential ISPs). I have no knowledge here, but at this point I'd be more likely to credit some router somewhere sucking than Anonymous with doing anything.

https://twitter.com/Join____Us/status/290623433191092224

Looks like a DNS attack? Lack of name resolution vs. server response?

Lack of both --- the nameservers are unreachable, but so is everything else. (MIT apparently hosts its own DNS, but attempting to ping internal servers by IP address, bypassing DNS, also fails.)

I was very surprised to see that when mit.edu went away, we also lost emergency.mit.net.

The site is back up

Reply on news.ycombinator.com