Sunday, January 07, 2018

The World Revolves Around Memphis

Chrome 63 is forcing all domains ending on .dev to be redirected to HTTPS via a preloaded HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) header. This may impact organizations that have been using .dev TLD privately for their own development teams.

Now most of us don't have to worry about that but it reminded me of a situation I had encountered at a former company.

My company had acquired another company. They were using an address space for their internal TCP/IP network that was routable but didn't belong to them. Obviously they weren't connected to the Internet.

They also had an internal DNS server that used their company's initials as a TLD. Needless to say that weren't the owner of the TLD.

Yeah, it took us a while to integrate them into our network.

But that was just the start.

As we were upgrading SAP worldwide we changed the GUI to use DNS rather than a hard-coded IP address. Then we pushed that change worldwide.

Then the SAP Basis team changed the target of the DNS name and watched for fallout.

Europe failed and was quickly addressed by updating our European DNS server.

But oddly, seemingly random US facilities were also failing.

We finally discerned that these were all facilities of the former company.

The on-site LAN admins determined that the locations' PCs had their DNS pointing to the former company's servers. Obviously they hadn't been updated.

When I reached out to management at the former company he responded that "You act like the world revolves around Memphis."

My response was "When it comes to DNS, it does."

Those were the good old days.

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