domain doesn't resolve (but hosts do)

Greg Woods woods at ncar.UCAR.EDU
Mon Sep 13 16:01:50 UTC 1999


We are having a problem here that sounds similar to the folks that
haven't paid their NSI bills, but I do not believe that is our problem.
The problem is that mail being sent with an SMTP sender ending with
"@ucar.edu" (our domain name) is being rejected with an unresolveable
domain error. Mail sent from other hosts here, e.g. "@host.ucar.edu",
is working fine. (one example is infi.net, which is still rejecting our
mail, but whose name servers don't seem to have a problem resolving our
domain name). I cannot find anything wrong with our primary or
secondary DNS servers. The information for this particular DNS record
has not been changed in over a year. The domain has SOA, NS, and MX
records, but no A record (my reading of RFC1123 says that an A record
is not required, and we have never had one). This problem just started
Thursday afternoon (Sept. 9) and is still continuing, although some
domains that were unable to send us mail (such as earthlink.net) are
now able to.

This looks as though one of our authoritative servers was issuing "no such
host" responses that got cached, but my impression was that negative responses
were only supposed to be cached for a very short time, but this problem has
lasted for almost 4 days now. I'm not ruling out a problem with our own
DNS, but I haven't been able to find it. If anyone can provide any clues
I would most appreciate it; I am getting beaten up rather heavily on this one.

Thanks,
--Greg


More information about the bind-users mailing list