Monday, January 16, 2012

Gabon ccTLD Namespace having issues?

According to a detailed analysis by Stephane Bortzmeyer, the .ga ccTLD has been down for four months which in English means that any domain with a .ga extension should not be resolving; in practice this is not the case at this time as many .ga websites are actually resolving. It seems the problem is finally being solved or the DNS blackout in Gabon is not as a total as originally reported early late last week.

According to Bortzmeyer, since September 2011, the .ga ccTLD namespace has been almost completely shut down. The outage began on 13th September but it's consequences were not immediately discernible(which is strange if this shut down had affected the high traffic .ga websites in the country, it should have been detected fairly quickly ) but according to the blog, the problem was only reported in December, 3 months after it started by both email and fax to ensure the message was received. Did the .GA ccTLD administrators go for an early Christmas? What really happened?


Bortzmeyer seems to blame this delayed action on the country's authoritarian political system where no one takes responsibility for anything. Well, that could be true or maybe far fetched but it would be helpful to hear from .GA ccTLD managers before rushing to conclusions on what really happened with .GA ccTLD namespace between September and December. I can access almost any .ga domains at this time so am assuming the problem was resolved?

If you are a techie, read Stephane's forensic analysis here; if you are non techie, please rush to the comment section and let us know what you think about this development :)

Work can be republished with attribution. Email Us africadomainnames@gmail.com

No comments:

Post a Comment