IP addresses in NS records seem to be breaking hostname resol ution

[Chris Davis]

Thank you, David.  Hopefully the phone call from an objective third party
will get them motivated!

Unfortunately, when I've e-mailed them, and when my "technical liason" and I
have spoken with them on the phone, we have had no luck.  Since
nslookup/dig/host tells them their host records resolve fine, the problem is
mine from their point of view.

That's why I'm looking for something I can do on my side, without boogering
up my configuration, to have the bad NS records rejected or at least dumped
from the cache after failure.

Hosting my own pacetech-inc.com zone file, though a possibility, opens a
door to headaches that I don't care to open.  As time marched on and I ran
across more companies with misconfigured NS records, I'd accumulate more
than a few zone files for zones that are not mine.

So, my question is still out there.  Is there any way to reject or dump the
bad NS records that contain IP addresses rather than hostnames?  

Of 6,667 NS records in my resolver's cache yesterday, 15 had I.P. addresses
rather than hostnames.  I'd imagine everyone's dns caches look about like
that everywhere percentage wise, statistically speaking. 

15 of 6,667 being wrong is only two tenths of one percent, which isn't much,
but this 2/10 of 1% of failed lookups could be solved if there were a way to
dump or reject the bad NS records and use the correct NS records provided by
the GTLD servers.

These dns failures are exacerbated with multiple failed attempts to send
mail, and then support calls and research about lost mail, and now this
discussion thread involving all of you!

It's not my misconfiguration, and it's been very difficult (read
"impossible") to convince the other guy it's his misconfiguration because
everything resolves fine at first glance.  It's caused me some headaches.
I'd like some legitimate defense against it.

My bet is that everyone everywhere is experiencing a "not insignificant"
amount of failures due to this type of problem.

Would a new bind feature to dump or reject invalid NS records be in order?
Or is there in fact a way to do this already?  

Chris Davis
Site Engineer
ComputerJobs.com

-----Original Message-----
From: David Botham [mailto:dns at botham.net]
Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2002 12:08 PM
To: bind-users at isc.org
Subject: RE: IP addresses in NS records seem to be breaking hostname
resolution




As a follow up, I forwarded this thread to both the soa responsible
email and whois responsible email.  And as an extra bonus, I called the
whois admin contact on the phone.  He was happy to here from me and said
he would call his ISP and light a fire under...

Dave...