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