help needed solving DNS puzzle (possible referral loop)

[Cricket Liu]

Barry Margolin <barmar at bbnplanet.com> wrote in message
news:<kUFs3.69$m84.1007 at burlma1-snr2>...
> It's not a Microsoft bug (wow, I never thought I'd be saying that).  If a
> domain is delegated to a server, and that server doesn't have the domain
> installed on it, DNS lookups in that domain should be expected to fail
> sometimes.  The querying DNS server is not supposed to keep trying servers
> until it gets one that gives an answer that it likes.  The only time you
> try an alternate server is when the server you tried doesn't respond at
> all.

Actually, I don't believe that's true of BIND.  BIND has an internal
mechanism to keep the name server from querying a lame server for what's now
known at the lame TTL, by default ten minutes.  See
http://www.isc.org/bind8.2/options.html and nslookup() in ns_forw.c.

cricket

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