Earthlink to Verisign: Piss Off

Submitted by chip on Thu, 18-Sep-2003 - 4:44 pm

The Net

It's been 48 hours since Verisign broke the Internet, and only a day since ISC released a workaround. The next step is to see whether the major providers deploy a workaround for the Verisign corruption. In particular, I'm curious what AOL, MSN, and Earthlink choose to do.

It turns out Earthlink may have acted already. I have their cable Internet service at home. If I try to look up a bogus domain, I get an error rather than the address of the Site Finder service.

    $ host www.die-verisign-scum.com
    Host www.die-verisign-scum.com. not found: 2(SERVFAIL)

If the Verisign corruption was being passed through, I'd expect to see an answer that said:

    www.die-verisign-scum.com. has address 64.94.110.11

There are two perplexing parts to this, however. First, the error returned is unexpected: SERVFAIL rather than NXDOMAIN. Second, Earthlink is running BIND 8.2.3-REL, and I'm not aware of patches being available for this version.

I'm a little confounded by the results. Maybe some DNS guru can explain what I'm seeing.