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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

So looking at this from a technical point. NIH.gov has three name servers. Each host are still up, but only answering dns on TCP and not UDP. All three are located under the same AS, which implies that there is a single operator responsible. No ipv6. From the outside I can't see any sign that they have delegated operation of either the servers or the service to any external company.

Doing some more looking around, it seems like NIH has a department/group/structure called Center for Information Technology, which is the IT support side of NIH and are the operators for the DNS servers.

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I'm going to regret this, I bet, but here we go: Many years ago I was the manager of the team inside NIH/CIT that ran both the border firewalls and the DNS servers in question (to be specific, at the time it was NIH/CIT/DNST/NEB/NSS). Obviously, since I'm not there anymore I don't have any special inside information, but given that the DNS servers were responding to TCP and not UDP during the outage, my bet would be a simple firewall screwup, rather than malice.

Stuff happens - maintenances have unintended consequences, people typo stuff, etc. Don't freak out about every event - save your powder for the real outrages (like 18F).

Editing to remove an unproductive comment.

And you believe that DOGE employees are tweaking firewall rules at NIH IT?

Like the vast majority of Americans, I have no idea what DOGE is actually doing.

Then why speculate when we have a real expert responding on the thread?

This is exactly how the HN community responded to Twitter, too. The amount of baseless speculation paraded as fact is crazy for a supposedly rationalist community.

HN is not rationalist community, there is a plurality of opinions and it is part of what make this site great.

Another important part is the excellent moderation that try to insure civil discussions.

The post-election HN community has been very different of late, at least on political topics. I’ve been here quite a while.

The world has been different since January. People are taking sides quickly and rightly so.

Maybe if I remembered or looked at how HN handled Trump's first election win then I'd have a more accurate impression, but both the Twitter/Musk takeover and now Trump's win and DOGE seem to have sent a lot of people into strange hysteria that I've rarely seen on HN. I just want people to calm down and provide better commentary but I think that would be downvoted to hell with responses like "don't you know <insert apocalyptic event here> is happening? Are you <select from stupid/bigoted/evil>?"

The other day, I had a chat with a friend (IRL) and he told me his friend told him that planes are falling from the sky because Trump had fired all the air traffic controllers (which, as Trump would put it, is fake news, driven by irresponsible headlines). The commentary here is on that, very low, very misguided, tribal (not even partisan, worse) and very unhelpful level. That's not the kind of plurality of opinion HN needs, in my opinion.

The first election was very different as he had more accountability in the other branches of government. Now we are seeing Nazi salutes right from the inauguration, the alienation of every ally, the opening of mass detention centres outside the US, executive orders to place himself above the courts while siding with Putin, and unofficially created branches of government acting without oversight to dismantle large swathes of the state.

The reaction is completely different because the reality is completely different. People are "hysterical" because we grew up with the explicit agreement that we wouldn't let these things happen again and now the systems which we built to prevent it are rapidly falling apart. When facism comes knocking at the door the time for plurality of opinion is gone, there are only two sides here and only one of them is in any way a moral choice.

I'm sorry to say, but I find your comment an example of the hysteria I mentioned.

Firstly, that is not fascism and I do wish people would stop misusing that word. The Doctrine of Fascism[1] is an interesting and elucidative read. I'm sure that tyrannical, authoritarian or any of the other more appropriate (yet still inaccurate, in my view) words would be a much better choice. The thesaurus lists arbitrary, which might fit Trump much better than any of them, but fascist, no. That would be a risible choice. Fascists don't cut the size of government for start, and they certainly don't fight for the right to do so in court. What a thought!

> the opening of mass detention centres outside the US

Are you referring to the Guatanamo Bay detention camp? That was opened in 2002 and has run continuously till now. Two Republican presidents, two Democrat. I was against it in 2002 and I'm glad people are finally noticing, but its use as a processing centre for migrants goes back even further to the early 90s (and less officially, the 1970s)[2].

> executive orders to place himself above the courts

That is not what the executive orders do, nor is that how the system works, and even if you think the executive's ignoring of court orders would be a crisis, Andrew Jackson ignored them[3], almost 200 years ago, America didn't descend into fascism (and not because it hadn't been conceived yet).

From[4]:

> The Trump administration is still entrenched in legal fights in the lower courts and, so far, has not defied any orders from the U.S. Supreme Court, the nation's highest court, she noted.

So, as I noted, hysteria.

[1] https://archive.org/details/doctrineoffascis0000muss

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Migrant_Operations_...

[3] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Worcester-v-Georgia

[4] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5293132/trump-vance-con...

> Firstly, that is not fascism and I do wish people would stop misusing that word.

It is facism. The treatment alone of the trans community is enough to earn it that title. If you want to make an argument from your book then please do so but linking to it alone is not an argument.

> Are you referring to the Guatanamo Bay detention camp?

Are you deciding to pick and choose from the list I gave you? The Nazi salutes mean nothing?

I'm referring to the directive to house 30,000 people there, up from a current population of zero. Coupled with dehumanising language like "illegals," the "delegation of immigration authority" to untrained officers, and the careless attitude to false positives make these developments very much incomparable to anything that's gone before (at least outside of places like Nazi Germany). Do ask yourself as well how easily the use of these facilities can be broadened in the future once there there to house other types of "illegals."

They are already ignoring the courts [0]. What the Executive Order does "legally" does not matter to someone who claims "he who serves his country breaks no law." The only thing that matters is intention. You're thinking about this from a legalist perspective but those days are gone.

0: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/10/nx-s1-5292342/trump-federal-f...

> If you want to make an argument from your book then please do so but linking to it alone is not an argument.

From[1]:

> "The Doctrine of Fascism" (Italian: "La dottrina del fascismo") is an essay attributed to Benito Mussolini. In truth, the first part of the essay, entitled "Idee Fondamentali" (Italian for 'Fundamental Ideas'), was written by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile, while only the second part "Dottrina politica e sociale" (Italian for 'Political and social doctrine') is the work of Mussolini himself.

Please, ignorance is natural, but brazen and wilful ignorance in support of an argument based on nothing but pejorative and performative tribalism is something for Twitter or Reddit, not here. If it were Twitter I’d definitely add a facepalm emoji instead of babying you through this.

> The Nazi salutes mean nothing?

If we’re referring to Musk then I must say that I don’t agree that it was a Nazi salute. In my country, we grew up with the war as a constant cultural reference so I’ve seen thousands of Nazi salutes, I’ve never seen one like that. Wishful thinking for more fodder for those performative pejoratives does not a Nazi salute make.

> The only thing that matters is intention.

Let me know when you do the Show HN for your mind reading device.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doctrine_of_Fascism

I know what the book is, but I need more than the title and the author to take an argument from it. Generally with references like this people will point to a page number or offer a summary of what they feel are the relevant parts

Yes, I'm referring to the Nazi salutes he gave. I can't help you see what you refuse to see right in front of you. Even Hitler gave it that way. I grew up in an apartheid conflict zone and have seen this othering before so let's not get into appeals to authority based on our backgrounds.

Calling me a baby is not an argument and I'm not sure that saying "I would totally emoji you but I'm too mature for that" is actually indicative of the maturity you're claiming. I want to point out as well that the tone of the conversation was set by yourself when you started it all with misogynistic accusations of hysteria.

1) Hysteria is a human emotion, not exclusive to females. To imply that it is certainly verges on misogyny.

2) If you knew what the Doctrine of Fascism was then you wouldn’t respond as you did. It contains the definition of fascism by the two figures that brought it to fame, one of whom was called “the godfather of fascism”.

3) Hitler did not salute that way and Musk did not make a Nazi salute.

4) I didn’t call you a baby, but I am having to baby you through basic knowledge. “To baby” is a verb, not an adjective.

5) I would use the facepalm emoji if this were Twitter. Have you noticed it’s not? Misquoting other users is not for HN.

I’ve thought about it and you’re right, this was just confirmation bias on my part. There is in fact no evidence that DOGE is in any way involved. Apologies.

I've popped back to this thread again (in the midst of another argument:) and noticed you've edited a preceding comment (perhaps unnecessarily but certainly magnanimously), which, along with this apology, I think, shows you in a good light and HN in general. Thank you, it's so good to see people being reasonable in amongst the tribalism.

18F?

See https://18f.org/

FWIW, nameservers lhcns1.nlm.nih.gov (130.14.55.72) and lhcns2.nlm.nih.gov (130.14.55.128) still resolve nlm.nih.gov subdomains.

Interesting, those IP addresses are under a different AS and under a different organization, that of National Library of Medicine. They don't seem to use the IT infrastructure of nih.gov.

Yeaaaahhhh...NLM is/was a special beast inside NIH.

At the time I was there they had a budget to die for, and Pubmed was in the top 300 websites in the world (both are probably still true). NLM pushed so much traffic because of Pubmed that they had their own internet connection to avoid DoS'ing the commodity desktop traffic of the rest of the NIH.

Yes, this is correct.

PubMed is self hosted in a datacenter located within NLM on the NIH campus.

They also have their own fiber connections as you mentioned.

There is also a legit storage vault located within the building that houses non digital records. We were told that there were medical records going back thousands of years kept there; and possibly as far back as the Egyptian era.

What am I doing wrong?

I can't ping 130.14.55.128

Maybe those goats don't do ICMP?

I can give two tips on how to test this.

The most accessible tool I would recommend is zonemaster.net, a tool developed by AFNIC and The Swedish Internet Foundation. Go to advanced and type in nlm.nih.gov as domain, and then the two nameservers listed above and their ip addresses. Run the test and it will present a status summery of the domain and its name servers. (or just use this link: https://zonemaster.net/en/result/4a7d593dce6e167b)

Alternatively you can use the tool dig command tool which is the industry standard for dns debugging and probing. Installing it on windows/mac is a bit of work, but is very easy and convenient on linux. The command here would be "dig @130.14.55.128 nlm.nih.gov". The @ sign is for saying which nameserver to use, and the last part is the domain name you are looking for.

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