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So looking at this from a technical point. NIH.gov has three name servers. Each host are still up, but only answering dns on TCP and not UDP. All three are loca
by belorn 2y ago
So looking at this from a technical point. NIH.gov has three name servers. Each host are still up, but only answering dns on TCP and not UDP. All three are located under the same AS, which implies that there is a single operator responsible. No ipv6. From the outside I can't see any sign that they have delegated operation of either the servers or the service to any external company.
Doing some more looking around, it seems like NIH has a department/group/structure called Center for Information Technology, which is the IT support side of NIH and are the operators for the DNS servers.
- g-clef 2y agoI'm going to regret this, I bet, but here we go: Many years ago I was the manager of the team inside NIH/CIT that ran both the border firewalls and the DNS servers in question (to be specific, at the time it was NIH/CIT/DNST/NEB/NSS). Obviously, since I'm not there anymore I don't have any special inside information, but given that the DNS servers were responding to TCP and not UDP during the outage, my bet would be a simple firewall screwup, rather than malice. Stuff happens - maintenances have unintended consequences, people typo stuff, etc. Don't freak out about every event - save your powder for the real outrages (like 18F).
- bryancoxwell 2y agoEditing to remove an unproductive comment.
- zmgsabst 2y agoAnd you believe that DOGE employees are tweaking firewall rules at NIH IT?
- bryancoxwell 2y agoLike the vast majority of Americans, I have no idea what DOGE is actually doing.
- brigandish 2y agoThen why speculate when we have a real expert responding on the thread?
- dcow 2y agoThis is exactly how the HN community responded to Twitter, too. The amount of baseless speculation paraded as fact is crazy for a supposedly rationalist community.
- nick__m 2y agoHN is not rationalist community, there is a plurality of opinions and it is part of what make this site great. Another important part is the excellent moderation that try to insure civil discussions.
- dcow 2y agoThe post-election HN community has been very different of late, at least on political topics. I’ve been here quite a while.
- AlecSchueler 2y agoThe world has been different since January. People are taking sides quickly and rightly so.
- brigandish 2y agoMaybe if I remembered or looked at how HN handled Trump's first election win then I'd have a more accurate impression, but both the Twitter/Musk takeover and now Trump's win and DOGE seem to have sent a lot of people into strange hysteria that I've rarely seen on HN. I just want people to calm down and provide better commentary but I think that would be downvoted to hell with responses like "don't you know <insert apocalyptic event here> is happening? Are you <select from stupid/bigoted/evil>?" The other day, I had a chat with a friend (IRL) and he told me his friend told him that planes are falling from the sky because Trump had fired all the air traffic controllers (which, as Trump would put it, is fake news, driven by irresponsible headlines). The commentary here is on that, very low, very misguided, tribal (not even partisan, worse) and very unhelpful level. That's not the kind of plurality of opinion HN needs, in my opinion.
- henryway 2y ago18F?
- vaylian 2y agoSee https://18f.org/ https://18f.org/
- raphman 2y agoFWIW, nameservers lhcns1.nlm.nih.gov (130.14.55.72) and lhcns2.nlm.nih.gov (130.14.55.128) still resolve nlm.nih.gov subdomains.
- belorn 2y agoInteresting, those IP addresses are under a different AS and under a different organization, that of National Library of Medicine. They don't seem to use the IT infrastructure of nih.gov.
- g-clef 2y agoYeaaaahhhh...NLM is/was a special beast inside NIH. At the time I was there they had a budget to die for, and Pubmed was in the top 300 websites in the world (both are probably still true). NLM pushed so much traffic because of Pubmed that they had their own internet connection to avoid DoS'ing the commodity desktop traffic of the rest of the NIH.
- hoofhearted 2y agoYes, this is correct. PubMed is self hosted in a datacenter located within NLM on the NIH campus. They also have their own fiber connections as you mentioned. There is also a legit storage vault located within the building that houses non digital records. We were told that there were medical records going back thousands of years kept there; and possibly as far back as the Egyptian era.
- catlikesshrimp 2y agoWhat am I doing wrong? I can't ping 130.14.55.128