Report on DNS problem 14-15.11.2016

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Dear miners! Unfortunately, many of you might have experienced Network connection problems on 14 and 15 of November. This post is a report on the reasons it happened and the solution we’ve come up with.

November, 14 at 12:30 UTC MinerGate users gradually started to disconnect from the pool. Our application was showing network error like on the screenshot below, supported alternative miners lost connection as well.

network-error

We managed to locate the reason, which was DNS provider GoDaddy. It wasn’t resolving MinerGate’s subdomains. It means that mining subdomains, such as xmr.pool.minergate.com, stopped being associated with IP addresses of the pool’s servers. Some countries weren’t affected.

Our team immediately contacted GoDaddy support, hoping to get quick resolution. Unfortunately, it proved itself to be quite unhelpful and slow. At first they were even refusing to acknowledge that they were causing the problem. At last, they reported the problem on their support center’s Twitter account.

godaddy-support-tweet

Later on, they claimed that the issue had been resolved, which wasn’t true for some of their clients, including MinerGate. All night we have been trying to make them prioritize the problem and fix the resolution of the pool’s subdomains. As they failed to do so, we started to prepare to switch to a different DNS service to bring our clients back online.

We implemented the changes November, 15 at approximately 09:00 UTC. The outcome was positive, our clients started to get back online and propagation check map began to look more optimistic.

propagation-map

09:30 UTC. Just switched to a different DNS service.

 

16:00 UTC. Only a few places are not connected yet.

16:00 UTC. Only a few places are not connected yet.

 

24 hours from switching to the new DNS - everything is back on.

24 hours from switching to the new DNS – everything is back on.

 

Bottom line

 

According to our statistics, all miners have successfully reconnected to the pool. We have completely moved our subdomains to a different DNS service. We don’t want our clients to be ever affected by such a problem again, thus we won’t use GoDaddy for this purpose anymore.

MinerGate team would like to thank our clients for patience and support in this situation. It was our great pleasure to react as quickly as possible to help you get back online.

Comments

is it still a problem? Currently (11/22) – I get “network error” trying to mine ETH with minergate GUI – was working fine the past several days

Hello, I am mining monero, fantomcoin, bytecoin and dashcoin and they have not been confirmed to the balance please help me …. from now thank you if you answered me

I just opened an account. Logged in successfully on the first attempt after downloading the software required to start mining. I tried logging in several times later and I get an error message ( Network error. Please check your internet connection).

Is there any way you can help me overcome this challenge, please?

Thank you.