Domain glitch halts .gov.au sites

January 15th, 2003
By Chris Jenkins

A ROUTER outage at domain name gatekeeper AusRegistry rendered some of Australia's state government websites unavailable for most of the day.

Three domain name servers maintained by AusRegistry were taken down by the problem, which was traced to AusRegistry's equipment in the Connect.com.au data centre in Melbourne.

The two most populous states - NSW and Victoria - were particularly affected, with nsw.gov.au and vic.gov.au unavailable for much of the day. Other states were also experiencing intermittent access problems on their websites.

Spokespeople for both the NSW and Victorian governments confirmed the problem lay with the AusRegistry domain name servers.

"Some state level domains in the .gov.au space experienced a temporary reduction in performance. In particular, nsw.gov.au seemed most affected," said AusRegistry managing director Adrian Kinderis.

"Because of the extensive redundancy in the domain name system the impact to all second-level domains under AusRegistry management was negligible," he said.

Second-level domains include .com.au, gov.au, net.au, .org.au, asn.au, and id.au.

Mr Kinderis said investigations into the cause of the problem were continuing. He said the reason .gov.au sites were particularly affected "is yet to be fully diagnosed".

The problem also prevented changes to the domain name registry at AusRegistry, with registrars unable to communicate with the database.

AusRegistry corrected the problem by mid-afternoon. Mr Kinderis said full service had been restored to all domain name servers and registries.