Broken DNS

[Opendium_Steve]

One of our customers on the SWGfL has been having ongoing problems with the Grid's DNS servers - querying the server (10.80.11.235) for AAAA (IPv6) records within the cloudapp.net domain takes a very long time before eventually failing. They have raised the problem with the Somerset ICT guys over a month ago, but so far they've done nothing to resolve it. We've explained how to test the problem and offered to help, but it seems to be going nowhere at the moment - we can reliably reproduce the problem within a few minutes, and have confirmed it with several different customers who are on the SWGfL, but so far Somerset have said they can't see a problem.

 

Is there a path to escalate the issue to someone technical enough to understand and resolve the problem?

[dblight]

We have had a few snags with SWGFL and have escalated through the help desk. It's been discussed at management level at RM HQ and its actively being worked on and nearly fixed. We are a secondary supporting 5 other schools that are all SWGFL (our school isn't) we had a few problems with authorisation for us to carry out requests on other schools behaves but SWGFL sent requests to all schools who replied with confirmation and now we act for all our schools in our Multi Academy Trust. If you can get that sorted you can escalate yourself if your schools are willing to provide SWGFL/RM authorisation.

 

As we are the central IT team for all schools and we don't use SWGFL I think they may have been worried we'd move all the schools to BT and away from them, thus I think that spurred them to act and escalate.

 

It's a difficult political process but you can do it! Just be prepared to take a few steps forward and lots backwards whilst the politics are being sorted!!

[Opendium_Steve]

Well this still hasn't been resolved and I'm not holding my breath at the moment... A suitably anonymised blog article describing the issues:

 

Steve's Blog: Ranting about LEA Network Administrators

[localzuk]

Somerset school IT is handled by SouthWest One, a joint venture between Somerset County Council, Avon and Somerset Police, Taunton Deane Council, and IBM. They have specific SLAs in place that they must meet. If they aren't meeting them, the school needs to complain to the Somerset eLim people I believe.

 

They should have more than enough expertise in SWO to deal with DNS issues. Also, in this case, the DNS server you mentioned is a SWO one, and nothing to do with SWGfL so best not to bring them into this unless you specifically know it is an issue with SWGfL's provision.

 

To be honest, I've had DNS problems in the past and they have indeed been incredibly slow to resolve them (last issue took 2 months for the ticket to end up resolved).

[Opendium_Steve]

They should have more than enough expertise in SWO to deal with DNS issues. Also, in this case, the DNS server you mentioned is a SWO one, and nothing to do with SWGfL so best not to bring them into this unless you specifically know it is an issue with SWGfL's provision.

 

I've tested against some DNS servers that I *believe* are the resolvers the LEA forwards to and they do indeed seem to work, so I'm not going to place the blame on the SWGfL. That said, the LEA haven't actually told me the IP addresses of the upstream resolvers, so I can't be sure.

 

To be honest, I was pretty thrown by "we don't know what port DNS would use"... I would _hope_ that anyone running a WAN would understand this stuff, but I'm not seeing much evidence of it at the moment.