Nov 27th 2006

Following a failure of Botswana Telecom's internet connectivity there is severe disruption to the Botswana (i.e. dot-BW) DNS. This note briefly explains some factors which have exacerbated the disruption.

The root nameservers of the internet currently identify four nameservers as responsible for the dot-BW (Botswana country code) DNS. These are:

RAIN.PSG.COM.	147.28.0.34
HIPPO.RU.AC.ZA.	146.231.128.1
DAISY.EE.UND.AC.ZA.	146.230.192.18
NS.UU.NET.	137.39.1.3

Unfortunately only the first two of those servers answer any DNS queries for dot-BW. Daisy has been lame for at least eight years while NS.UU.NET has always refused to answer queries although it is possible that it might answer queries from uunet networks.

It should be noted that the only dot-BW records that Rain and Hippo hold are NS (NameServer) records. These indicate the specific nameservers for the domain in question. Although Rain and Hippo try to answer queries they do not have records for all Botswana domains. They appear to have records for domains at the root of the BW tree such as info.BW, btc.BW, gov.BW and botswanacraft.BW but they don't have records for second level domains such as afrs.CO.BW or stjosephcollege.AC.BW

Hippo and Rain indicate that answers to DNS queries about BW domains can be obtained from these servers:

bw nameserver = hippo.ru.ac.za.
bw nameserver = rain.psg.com.
bw nameserver = vpsm.btc.bw.
bw nameserver = ns1.btc.bw.
bw nameserver = ns4.btc.bw.


Rain and Hippo do not answer recursive queries i.e. they do not query the BTC nameservers mentioned above or the other nameservers which they know hold dot-BW records, they just indicate which nameservers have the records. This means that they do not build up a cache of answers to BW queries.

The implication of this is that if BTC's internet feed is down and you are trying to access second level BW domains you will be unable to do so unless your ISP is hosting those domains or has cached DNS records indicating where to find them.

Return to BTG status page