MS DNS mess matched by 25% of Fortune 1000

All servers on same network segment. Tsk

More than a third of companies are vulnerable to the kind of domain name system (DNS) problems that made Microsoft's web sites unavailable this week.

A survey by Icelandic DNS specialist Men & Mice on a random sample of 5 000 active .com domains, showed that 38 per cent of sites were running all their DNS servers on the same network segment - thus creating a single point of failure. A lack of redundancy might be expected in smaller companies, but Men & Mice found that 25 per cent of Fortune 1000 companies were making the same mistake as Microsoft.

Microsoft's outages this week, caused both by a misconfiguration of its networks and the subsequent denial of service attacks, could have been prevented if their servers had not been on the same subnet, according to the Men & Mice.

Sjofn Agustsdottir, a director at Men and Mice, said: "It is clear that a stunning number of companies have serious DNS configuration problems which can lead to failure at any time. A single point of failure can go undetected for months which is simply a disaster waiting to happen."

DNS is responsible for translating IP addresses into more easily remembered domain names and vice versa, routing mail to its proper destinations and other fundamental Internet services. ®

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