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Comment by flaxton | Hacker News Reader

Can’t you just pull the drive from the failed server, extract the DNS entries and build a new DNS server? It doesn’t sound like everything is broken, just that it is failing because the DNS server isn’t answering. Just install Linux on a new box and set up a DNS server on it. It could be done in a day I would expect. Or am I missing something?

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It would work if they knew what the DNS entries were but seems they lost all DNS records and don't even know what records they have/had, so spinning up a new DNS server won't help as they don't know what it should serve.

> All domain information was wiped out and records became null [...] Our records are wiped from all domain servers out there [...] We don't even know what domains we own, the listing was hosted in the ERP which is now busted

That's part of what bothers me about this whole story--it says they were running BIND, which configs on text files for goodness sake. These critical records were tiny and could fit anywhere & transfer in the blink of an eye. That such a simple thing is buried under & dependent upon an entire complex and untested/maintained DR plan is mind-boggling.

> That such a simple thing is buried under & dependent upon an entire complex and untested/maintained DR plan is mind-boggling

I find this to pretty common in many setups where the engineers don't focus on simplicity and removing layers of abstraction. If the workforce is young and inexperienced, over-engineering tends to happen everywhere and you end with situations like this.

I have seen worse in my years in the industry, that's for sure.

Its encrypted and the encryption keys are lost.

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