DNS Administrator seeks clue on NXDOMAIN

[Todd Herr]

On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, at 19:13, Danny Mayer wrote:

> Whatever else is wrong, your nameservers listed in the WHOIS records
> don't agree with the nameservers listed in the dns1.rrland.com that you
> digged, both the IP addresses and the names of the nameservers.
>
>          Danny

Yeah, I know; that's intentional.  That's what I was referring to
when I wrote:

> >    (Note that dns[123].rrland.com is a set of virtual interfaces
> >     on ns1.biz.rr.com, ns2.biz.rr.com, and dns4.rr.com,
> >     respectively.  We're in the middle of migrating lots of
> >     domains to these servers, with a hard deadline to shut off
> >     services at the old site, so this is our "solution" until
> >     such time as the registration paperwork can be processed.)

The domain rrland.com is going away, as soon as the 1000+ domains
that are hosted there update their WHOIS information.  The hosts
that used to be dns[123].rrland.com are going to be shutdown real
soon now (the deadline for that is not under my control) and this
is the solution we came up with.  We control the domain rrland.com,
just not the hosts formerly known as dns[123].rrland.com.  We're
providing DNS services for these domains, but we don't manage the
contact records for those domains.

Coordinating the efforts of 1000+ contacts to update their WHOIS
records all on a given day is, I'm sure you can understand, an
herculean task, one that's nigh on impossible.  Our alternative is
several bulk updates with several different registrars, but that
effort takes more time than we had to complete this task.  What
we can control is a continuity of DNS service, by having the zone
data reflect the future while still providing answers in the present.
The A record for dns1.rrland.com evaluates to an IP address that is
live on the host formally known as ns1.biz.rr.com; rather than using
the listen-on configuration option with two copies of BIND, I've got
one copy of BIND listening on multiple interfaces and answering
authoritatively on both.  When any given domain updates their WHOIS
information to reflect their new nameservers, the changes to the zone
files are a no-op.

I've sent of a note to Network Solutions to try and determine what
might be the matter here, on the advice of others; I wanted to query
here first before I did that, because I wanted to make sure I wasn't
overlooking something.

Thanks to all who responded.

-- 
Todd Herr                                         todd at angrysunguy.com