Randy,
Thanks for the concern -- if I understand your email correct the issue is not that you cannot resolve donate.wikimedia.org; but it's that one of our subdomains resolves to something that's not a WMF server?
If so; the behavior you're seeing, that links.email.donate.wikimedia.org goes to ?.mkt41.net is correct. What we're doing is year is using an external bulk mailer to try and ensure deliverability of fundraising mail (it turns out that we get about $1 per email so getting good deliverability is pretty important.) The bulk mailer, Silverpop, does link rewriting in the body of the email for use statistical things (we A/B test our emails and use their dashboards to do so).
For what its worth our donor rights policy [1] applies to this type of data.
[1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donor_policy
~Matt Walker Wikimedia Foundation Fundraising Technology Team
On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 3:44 PM, Randy Bush randy@psg.com wrote:
leslie, you out there?
ryuu.psg.com:/Users/randy> host links.email.donate.wikimedia.org. links.email.donate.wikimedia.org is an alias for recp.mkt41.net. recp.mkt41.net has address 74.121.50.40
$ dscacheutil -flushcache
does not clear it
this is all in tokyo. so i ssh into a server in seattle westin.
psg.com:/usr/home/randy> host links.email.donate.wikimedia.org. links.email.donate.wikimedia.org is an alias for recp.mkt41.net. recp.mkt41.net has address 74.121.50.40
the real or unreal CNAME RR is pretty prevalent
pretoria
root@afnog:~ # host links.email.donate.wikimedia.org. links.email.donate.wikimedia.org is an alias for recp.mkt41.net. recp.mkt41.net has address 74.121.50.40
london starts to scare me
drinx.linx.net:/root# host links.email.donate.wikimedia.org. ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached drinx.linx.net:/root# host links.email.donate.wikimedia.org. ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
so i look at the nearest zone i can find
ryuu.psg.com:/Users/randy> doc -p -w donate.wikimedia.org. Doc-2.2.3: doc -p -w donate.wikimedia.org. Doc-2.2.3: Starting test of donate.wikimedia.org. parent is
wikimedia.org. Doc-2.2.3: Test date - Tue Nov 26 10:46:48 JST 2013 SYSerr: No servers for donate.wikimedia.org. returned SOAs ... Summary: YIKES: doc aborted while testing donate.wikimedia.org. parent wikimedia.org. Incomplete test for donate.wikimedia.org. (1) Done testing donate.wikimedia.org. Tue Nov 26 10:46:49 JST 2013
at least the parent is ok
ryuu.psg.com:/Users/randy> doc -p -w wikimedia.org. Doc-2.2.3: doc -p -w wikimedia.org. Doc-2.2.3: Starting test of wikimedia.org. parent is org. Doc-2.2.3: Test date - Tue Nov 26 10:47:45 JST 2013 Summary: No errors or warnings issued for wikimedia.org. Done testing wikimedia.org. Tue Nov 26 10:47:48 JST 2013
aha!
ryuu.psg.com:/Users/randy> ns donate.wikimedia.org. donate-lb.eqiad.wikimedia.org.
i suspect a load balancer
yes, i reported this to wikimedia two days ago. a response, then black hole. problem persists.
randy