Internet Access Disrupted
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On Monday night between about 7pm and 10pm there are widespread reports of intermittent access to websites. Looking at our traffic graphs sees a significant decrease in traffic. We are currently investigating the cause of this problem and will report back as soon as more information is available.
Update 11.20am Tuesday 21st October: Apologies for the interruption to ResNet last night. We've investigated the incident and discovered what happened. Please read on to help us stop it happening again.
A pair of computers connected to ResNet caused a storm of requests to our name servers. Each computer sent thousands of requests every second. This overloaded our two name servers so they couldn't process anything else. The name servers (DNS servers) are used to look up where to find an Internet server - so without DNS you can't access anything on the Internet. We are doing everything we can to reduce the impact, but to really solve the problem we need to prevent it at source.
This storm is caused by a bug in the original version of Windows Vista. Any computer with the original version of Windows Vista can cause this, but upgrading to Windows Vista Service Pack 1 fixes the problem. Windows XP & Apple Mac computers don't have the problem either. To make sure this doesn't happen again we need everyone on ResNet to check their Windows version, and then install Windows Vista Service Pack 1 if they need it.
- Click the Start button
- In the Start Search box, type winver and click OK (if you can't see Start Search, click Run and type winver in there instead).
- Look at the version number:
- If it says Version 5.1 you have Windows XP and don't need to do anything.
- If it says Version 6.0Â (Build 6001, Service Pack 1) you already have Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and don't need to do anything.
- If it says Version 6.0 (Build 6000) you have Windows Vista original and must install Service Pack 1. To do this click Start, Control Panel. Under Security, click Check for Updates. Click to install all important or critical updates. These include Service Pack 1.
For people interested in the technical details of this problem, please see Windows Vista DNS flooding.