BigU's dumb-A DNS

Most of the servers of BigU have been unreachable since this afternoon. Thank gods for Google's cache... By this evening it all got too much for me and I decided to check the WHOIS information at http://www.ac.za/ to get some information about the setup. This is what I found out.

1. The contact e-mail addresses of the administrators are in the domain which they administer. Google is brave enough to do this, but CNN is not.
   
2. All the nameservers are on BigU campuses. Ditto re Google and CNN.
   

At least a neighbouring large residential university has had the sense to specify a nameserver in the far-off Eastern Cape. BigU is, however, ignoring the stipulation

[A]t least one secondary name server must be on a different network from the primary server

on the registration form. In my understanding, this means that a problem with the nameservers on the BigU campus will make the entire BigU network inaccessible, except by IP address. In any case, the problem actually appears to be worse because the servers cannot be reached by IP address either... Ouch. If I remember correctly, they are in the examination period.