failing lookups

[Kevin Darcy]

The problem with smsocs.com is quite insidious: the published nameservers are "godzilla.smsocs.com" and "ns2.aimnet.com". Since "godzilla" does not appear in the delegation records (which only consist of verio.net nameservers, BTW), there is no glue record in the TLD servers, and so if the A record for that name happens to time out of a cache before the NS record, then that name becomes completely unresolvable. That leaves "ns2.aimnet.com" as a Single Point of Failure. And it doesn't appear to be answering
queries right now. Ergo, the domain is effectively unresolvable. You could restart your nameserver to get this working temporarily, but eventually this will keep on happening again and again as long as the underlying conditions persist, and I'm sure you don't want to keep having to restart your nameserver...

Whomever owns smsocs.com should harmonize their delegation records with the NS records published in the zone, i.e. either add NS records for the verio.net nameservers to the zone, or add those other 2 nameservers to the delegation records and delete the verio.net nameservers, or come up with some combination of verio.net and non-verio.net nameservers that is the same in both places.

                                                                                                                                - Kevin
Bob Puff at NLE wrote:

> Hi Kevin,
>
> Thanks for the reply.
>
> > Of course, this is all assuming that the two nameservers you identified are actually the nameservers published in the NS
> > records of the zone. If the zone is delegated to 2 nameservers, but only 1 of them is published in the zone's NS records,
> > then the zone's NS records, being more "credible" than the delegation records, will be what named uses
> > to resolve names in the zone. Which might explain why the other, unpublished nameserver is being ignored.
>
> I believe this is precisely what was wrong with one of my instances.
>
> A domain I am currently having trouble with is: smsocs.com.  There are a number of errors with their setup; however, I can dig through and get the info.  My problem right now is that my ISP won't talk to dns2.ncal.verio.net, which is one of their nameservers.  Also, one of their other nameservers is down (that is listed in their record).  However, there are a couple that ARE up that WILL give the correct info.. just my Bind won't seem to query them.  It gives up after it tries querying one of the dead servers.
>
> Bob