{"id":254239,"date":"2018-04-02T17:58:07","date_gmt":"2018-04-02T15:58:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=254239"},"modified":"2018-04-02T17:59:17","modified_gmt":"2018-04-02T15:59:17","slug":"the-post-office-website-downtime-uncovered-serious-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/internet\/254239-the-post-office-website-downtime-uncovered-serious-problems.html","title":{"rendered":"The Post Office website downtime uncovered serious problems"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The main reason for the <a href=\"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/government\/252995-sa-post-office-website-down-emails-bouncing-domain-fees-not-paid.html\"><strong>recent downtime of the SA Post Office website<\/strong><\/a> was the suspension of its domain due to non-payment.<\/p>\n<p>However, this is only the tip of the iceberg that is the organisation&#8217;s problems.<\/p>\n<p>The website was down for several days, and emails sent to @postoffice.co.za addresses bounced.<\/p>\n<p>This downtime was disruptive for users and further hurt the organisation\u2019s poor reputation.<\/p>\n<p>The reason for the downtime is of concern, as the domain name renewal fee was R125.40 and the payment was outstanding for several weeks.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/calvin-browne-76342468\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Calvin Browne<\/strong><\/a>, cofounder of DNS Africa and head of international registrar relations at Domain Name Services, <a href=\"https:\/\/dnsafrica.blog\/2018\/03\/28\/www-postoffice-co-za-downtime-and-dns-issues-affecting-its-reliability\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>explained the situation in detail.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Browne highlighted the following in the buildup to the downtime:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>1 February 2018<\/strong> \u2013 An invoice was issued for the domain and sent to the current billing address: \u201cdomainmaster@postoffice.co.za\u201d. The email was successfully delivered.<\/li>\n<li><strong>1 March 2018<\/strong> &#8211; An additional statement was sent, detailing the outstanding amount. The email was successfully delivered.<\/li>\n<li><strong>12 March 2018<\/strong> &#8211; A final warning was emailed to all the whois records, along with the domain master email address.<\/li>\n<li><strong>19 March 2018<\/strong> &#8211; The domain is suspended due to non-payment, by removing it from the co.za zone.<\/li>\n<li><strong>20 March 2018<\/strong> &#8211; A payment is processed, and the domain is returned to the co.za zone.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The lack of payment was not the only issue, however.<\/p>\n<p>Browne said the website remained down after the payment, as there were several errors with the \u201cpostoffice.co.za\u201d zone setup.<\/p>\n<p>He said the problems which were uncovered made it \u201cquite remarkable that anything works at all\u201d and contributed to the extended downtime.<\/p>\n<p>Browne gave a detailed explanation of these problems, which included:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There are seven nameservers, instead of the listed five in the registration.<\/li>\n<li>One of the nameservers &#8211; waterbok.postoffice.co.za &#8211; is not valid.<\/li>\n<li>The \u201cpostoffice.co.za\u201d domain is susceptible to DNS cache poisoning and is vulnerable to being hacked to give out incorrect entries.<\/li>\n<li>One nameserver &#8211; gemsbok.postoffice.co.za &#8211; is not listed in the co.za zone.<\/li>\n<li>When Browne queried the \u201cgemsbok\u201d nameserver, \u201cwaterbok\u201d had been replaced by \u201cgemsbok\u201d and \u201cgemsbok.postoffice.co.za\u201d was gone.<\/li>\n<li>The TTLs (Time To Live records) are different \u2013 on \u201cgemsbok.postoffice.co.za\u201d they are set to expire in one day (86,400 seconds), while \u201cwaterbok.postoffice.co.za\u201d was 10 minutes (600 seconds).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Browne further uncovered that certain Internet Solutions nameservers are used for the postoffice.co.za domain.<\/p>\n<p>However, when he tested the IS nameservers, they responded with \u201cSERVFAIL\u201d, which \u201cbasically means they know nothing about postoffice.co.za\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBasically, you have a bunch of misconfigurations in the postoffice.co.za domain, with errors across all of the listed nameservers,\u201d said Browne.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTwo of five registered nameservers do not even know about the domain, and all of the ones that do answer contain weird nonsensical nameservers. And two of the nameservers cannot be trusted to serve the correct information.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Browne said it is \u201cno wonder things took so long to come back up once the domain was reinstated\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Alarm bells should ring at the Post Office, as these errors appear to be replicated on \u201cpostbank.co.za\u201d and other Post Office domains.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"my-4\">Now read:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/government\/252995-sa-post-office-website-down-emails-bouncing-domain-fees-not-paid.html\">SA Post Office \u2013 Website down, emails bouncing, domain fees not paid<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The fact that the SA Post Office\u2019s website was down because it could not pay a R125.40 invoice is only the tip of the iceberg.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":144173,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[49687,35,3734,16590,3736],"class_list":["post-254239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-calvin-browne","tag-headline","tag-post-office","tag-sa-post-office","tag-sapo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254239"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254239"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":254469,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254239\/revisions\/254469"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}