Re-post from an email to my old LUG:

Ok this is weird.

First, I started getting 503 errors from mirrorlist.centos.org when
trying to use yum on some centos servers.

Then, no more centos.org DNS resolution at all. So first, I ran to
google. Turns out I found a post from Dec 4 2007 with the same problem. It was
apparently down for about an hour, then the user reported it was back again. I
also tried a few links to sites in the centos.org domain, but of course DNS is
broke for all of them, so that's a no-go.

So I tried tracing DNS from the root servers to get to centos.org. I got
to the org. nameservers, and ta-da! They have no idea who centos.org is.

Next I whois centos.org. Well, well, lookie here:

Domain ID:D103409469-LROR
Domain Name:CENTOS.ORG
Created On:04-Dec-2003 12:28:30 UTC
Last Updated On:05-Dec-2008 06:45:17 UTC
Expiration Date:04-Dec-2009 12:28:30 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Tucows Inc. (R11-LROR)
Status:CLIENT HOLD
Status:AUTORENEWPERIOD

Not only do they only register their domain for a year at a time
(apparently), but someone forgot to re-up. Again. For the second year in
a row.

wtf? Has it really been broken since 12:30 this afternoon UTC? I guess
my cache just expired.

I have packages to install.

[Edit: Also, the time on this post is wrong. This started (for me) at about 06:00 GMT -- taking that into account, what's with the "Last Updated On:05-Dec-2008 06:45:17 UTC"?]

And how do you like these apples...

Checking around I wanted to see how other sites on the interwebs thought of the domain.

OpenDNS is resolving the domain! I went and found OpenDNS's main nameserver (208.67.222.222) and that resolves www.centos.org to 72.232.194.162 with a 120 second TTL. I let the TTL expire and queried again, and sure enough another correct response with the 120 TTL.

I validated that IP by googling it and got a posting about someone pinging "centos.org" and it resolves to that address (June 2007).

Another test I gave it was the w3c validator trying http://www.centos.org. That correctly responds "bad hostname."

Does OpenDNS extend TTLs transparently? That's not nice.

And as of about 09:30 UTC, it's back up again. Just like last year [webhostingtalk.com].

Odd.