On Wednesday, October 28, campus migrated to a new set of Domain Name System (DNS) Infoblox appliances. In the process, domain names under their control were changed from the previous standard of mixed-case (e.g. violet.Berkeley.EDU) to all-lowercase (e.g. violet.berkeley.edu). This change was unannounced.

DNS names are “case insensitive”, but some applications that use DNS names are aware of case. In particular, NFS exports of our filesystems from home.eecs, project.eecs, and cluster.eecs, which are managed by netgroups in NIS, rely on case-sensitive name resolution to allow or deny access. The campus change caused exports to machines in subdomains such as Millennium.Berkeley.EDU, CITRIS.Berkeley.EDU, and IST.Berkeley.EDU to suddenly be denied. We have updated our own NIS netgroup entries to reflect the case changes, so expected NFS access has resumed.

Other applications that may be affected by this case change include web and database applications.

Campus has indicated that they have no plans to roll back the changes in Infoblox. They recommend that users update their applications to the new standard.

At this time, our independently-managed subdomains (EECS.Berkeley.EDU, CS.Berkeley.EDU, Banatao.Berkeley.EDU) continue to be mixed-case.