Federal Government Inadvertently Deleted Ca.Gov

An anonymous reader writes "A Network World reader whose brother works for a California state agency forwarded me an e-mail alert that his brother received: "The Department of Technology Services (DTS) has notified us that the Federal Government inadvertently deleted the CA.GOV domain. As the evening progresses you may experience an impact in your ability to access some Web sites and exchange e-mail. DTS is working with their federal counterparts to restore service as quickly as possible but service may not be restored until tomorrow morning.""

behind the scenes

"We don't for sure have the whole picture, but as we understand it, there was some event at the Transportation Authority of Marin Country where their site got hacked," Hanacek told me this afternoon. Traffic was being redirected from that site to one featuring pornography.

A department within the U.S. General Services Administration in Washington oversees and polices the .gov domain.

"The federal government saw this incorrect use of ca.gov and they made a change at a much more global level than probably was necessary and it started taking down all of our ca.gov domain," says Hanacek. "That impacted Web access and e-mail services."

Damn... all this because someone pointed their IP surveillance camera at the nude beach across the street.

Re:behind the scenes

"We're from the government we're here to help!"

just like katrina

The Department of Technology Services (DTS) has notified us that the Federal Government inadvertently deleted the CA.GOV domain.

That's not a mistake, someone just put FEMA's earthquake-recovery plan into action a little bit early.

Re:just like katrina

That's not recovery. That's acceptance.

Re:just like katrina

Were the administrators responsible for this also graduates of Oral Roberts University? They're everywhere else in government . . .

Re:just like katrina

Deleting CA.GOV? I didn't realize that FEMA was planning was to actually erase Arnold Schwarzenegger.

When you hire the Eraser (1996)

what did you think would happen?

Simple to fix?

Can they not just:

# scp bkuser@backupserver:/etc/bind/zones/gov.ca.zonefile /etc/bind/zones
# service named reload

voila!

Re:Simple to fix?

How do you "route" a domain name? Sure you can point the authoritive NS's to some black hole, but that's easily enough reversed. DNS changes don't 'propagate' upstream. They can be cached downstream, but nothing irrevocable, and there's no route to propagate. "ca.gov" is not a AS network.

Sorry

I believe little to none of what I hear anymore.
How do you accidently delete an entire domain?
I call - liar,liar pants on fire.

Re:Sorry

Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity.

Re:Sorry

Malice gets you fired, while stupidity gets excused and forgiven. Which would you prefer your actions to be seen as?

Re:Sorry

any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

Re:Sorry

It's easy to delete a domain. Delete the zone file on the primary name server and reload the daemon. That's only two steps, and it would really ruin your day if you didn't keep a backup on hand. Why would you think it's not hard to do?

Re:Sorry

How do you accidently delete an entire domain?

You're grossly over-estimating the competence of the federal government. The only thing surprising about this is that they didn't delete the entire .gov domain.

In related news...

Shortly after this story broke, it was announced that Federal Offices were raided by an Austrian Cyborg who repeatedly shouted "My domain will be back!". The identity of the intruder is currently under investigation.

Yo DTS Help Desk!!!

While you're at it, why not delete whitehouse.gov?

Ooops.

At least the Feds don't have to worry about Iraq, Iran, et al. for the next few days. They've probably upset The Terminator and, as we all know, he'll be back.

who really cares, when does ca.mx go live?

California isn't still part of the US, is it?

Re:who really cares, when does ca.mx go live?

Well, the northern part is, but the southern part never was.

Terrorists ....

Terrorists we can handle. What really scares is an attack of the stupids.

Why wait?

I see the federal government isn't waiting around for the San Andreas Fault do to its work... they're cutting California free now!

Why not just use the .ca TLD?

It's not like anyone else it using it?

Re:Why not just use the .ca TLD?

Why not use ca.us ?

This is normal.

Nothing to see here, folks. This is a new government program to prevent crime:
http://slate.com/id/2152487 [slate.com]

If only...

If only these idiots were running more of my life.

What REALLY happened

Dick Cheney didn't want anyone to know that California actually exists(and if people cannot know about it, then their congressmen go away) so he arbitrarily declared it to be top secret.

No wonder!

I was attempting to do some research at the California DMV web site yesterday and kept getting 404's. Google cache to the rescue. Maybe they can rebuild from that alone!

OOPS! I've entered CA.ORG by mistake

but it kind of looked the same. California, drug addict site, what's the difference?

Why such a low TTL?

Shouldn't they use a longer time to live (7 days? 1 month?) for such important dns records?

Thats a start...

Now that we got the fed-gov to delete the ca.gov domain how can we get them to delete the rest of the state? Isnt it due to brake off from the rest of the CONUS? :P

Actually this is a news leak

The real news is that the federal government is going to allow California to succeed from the Union, part of that preparation is deleting the domain name.

Re:Actually this is a news leak

"As for immigration, solving that came at a heavy cost, and I personally regret the loss of California. However, the new Mexifornian economy is strong and El Presidente Schwarzenegger is doing a great job."

gov.c eh

Pardon, eh? I saw the typo of 'ca.gov' and corrected it to 'gov.ca' and the next thing I knew the terminator kicked the door down, eh...

Gotta wonder ......

Would this have happened if they voted Republican? It's not really a joke since Bush has snubbed California ever since the 2000 election.

It's back...

Is it just me, or does http://www.ca.gov/ [ca.gov] still work? I mean, I just went there and got a page reading "Welcome to the State of California." I guess this problem's already been resolved.

California fell off the edge of the internet

When I was a small child, I was told by other children that one day, California would have a large enough earthquake to fall off the western edge of the U.S. In more recent years, I have come to believe that politically speaking, California has fallen off the left edge of the U.S.
It appears that at least metaphorically, and temporarily, this falling off of the rest of the world has finally happened. California fell (or was pushed) off the internet.

.RU TLD is protected against this...

In Soviet Russia, TLD deletes you!

This is an outrage!

Someone should email the governor and complain!

---

(If you don't get the joke, look up his email address some time when you're not too busy.)

Blame Canada

Maybe they got confused and thought Canadians wre infiltrating the U.S. federal government. What if, horrors, they were separatist Freedom [wikipedia.org] Canadians?

Sure!

...and you really want to give these people control over your healthcare? :>

Indeed!

Coincidence?

Coincidence that Canadian dollar actually surpasses the US dollar and then this happens? I think not...

For some reason

I keep thinking of that scene in Ghostbusters when they shut the containment field down...

I think of the city engineer as compared to the poor network admin they got to do this.

still can be accessed

www.ca.gov i have tried the url above, and i can go to the webpage without problem, it can be accessed as usual.. i think DTS mistakenly notified the writer's brother. and it is a shocking news if really a federal goverment had deleted leading domain. is it the federal goverment(people working there) that stupid?

was it perhaps...

...terminated?

No problem here.

California should just take over .ca or .cr and declare independence. The flag already reads "California Republic," and it's not like Canada or Costa Rica will notice. Well... not Costa Rica anyway. ;)

Gee California cops it doesn't it?

First there was Enron shutting off the power and now we have the Federal Government shutting off their Internet!

States shouldn't be using .gov

California should be using state.ca.us anyway--then they wouldn't have had a problem. .gov is intended for the U.S. federal government.

state.ca.us

As I recall, *.gov was supposed to be federal government anyway. Using *.state.ca.us would make more sense, but it is more verbose and I guess it isn't as sexy.

They've learned from Burma--Prelude to Martial Law

That'll teach us out here in the colonies (pretty much anywhere outside the DC beltway, with the exceptions of Texas, Florida, and Ohio) not to get uppity!

Always cut-off communications before sending in the troops!

What?

How the hell do you delete a domain?!?!

Move along....

Da Ahrnold's face is back up at the DMV. Nothing happening here.

Re:Inadvertently? Um, might want to check further

Gotta keep those pinko Californeeeanns in line! Gkgkgkgkgk....

G. Bush.

I sense a disturbance in the Force...

...as if millions of URLs cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Re:Did they mean Canada?

Maybe it's the new American take over strategy for rogue nations. Looks like the implementation went as well as the old way.