Strange DNS problem

[Pete Ehlke]

On Tue, Aug 06, 2002 at 02:28:40PM +0000, unixman wrote:
> Hi there, David - yeah, I suppose that would hepl, wouldn't it? :)
> 
> Domain name in question is "wetcanvas.com".
> 
> Thank in advance for any insights ...
> 
The delegation data for wetcanvas.com is:

wetcanvas.com.          172800  IN      NS      NS5.CAPITALINTERNET.com.
wetcanvas.com.          172800  IN      NS      WWW.INCURSIO.com.

Yet those servers say:

wetcanvas.com.          11h6m40s IN NS  wetcanvas.com.

This is bad on several levels. wetcanvas.com seems to be your web server
as well as your name server, so when it crashed, you were left without
name service as well as without web service. You only list the one
server, so when it crashed and clients had that NS record cached, you
were out of luck. There's no glue for wetcanvas.com in the gtld servers,
so it's possible for the NS record to exist in caches longer than the
corresponding A record, rendering your zone non-functional.

The best thing for you to do is to have your delegated name servers
listed in your zone file, rather than your own glueless single point of
failure. The DNS is only as robust as the data that you put in it, and
in this case your data wasn't very robust.

-Pete