This seems to be an interesting test and I wonder if there is any pool DNS server located inside Russia?
If not, resolving “ru.pool.ntp.org” would be impossible for the time of the test, which therefore could lead to interesting failures - i.e. rebooting of a device without a built-in RTC…
Even if the zone can’t get updated from outside russia, the at-the-time working zone should be fine enough, but (of course) only, if DNS resolution is still working.
They may just hijack the pool.ntp.org domain and translate *.pool.ntp.org to random pool servers inside Russia in the test period. Only if they remember to hijack this domain…
I know with Bind it can be configured to continue serving stale cached entries if it’s unable to contact the authoritative dns server, I’m sure other DNS software can do similar and that’s probably how they are going to handle it if they go through with unplugging themselves.
I can confirm that we don’t have any DNS servers in Russia at the moment. One of the volunteers is in talks with major exchange in Russia to get something deployed in country before the test. If it works, we’ll have 1 DNS server that will resolve during the test. The DNS data is updated every few minutes but the server can run standalone if the master is unreachable.
If you have a vm in Russia that you’d be willing to offer, let me or @ask know. Specs are pretty low: Ubuntu or CentOS, 2x 64bit cores @2Ghz (more or less), 2 GB RAM, 5 Mbps bandwidth. It must not be a shared vm as we’ll lock it down, you won’t be able to login anymore.
