Everybody Resolves this Domain but Us.

[Martin McCormick]

Simon Waters writes:
>BIND is more vigilant than I am.
>
>Lame domains from recent log file entries
>accxxmaps.COM
>
>So the SOA email for the problems with the accxx123.com domain
>doesn't work as the DNS of that domain is broken as well.
>
>Exactly how often do Martin's customers get these websites to
>work I wonder.

	I wonder that myself.  This is a university and the site
we are trying to reach is one that students use to buy
long-distance telephone service.  Some of these students live in
campus housing and others may not so some of them go through our
network and others have the array of internet service providers
that serve the community at large.  A lot of them can and do
resolve this domain at least some of the time.  I bet it isn't
all the time.

	Our master dns process has been running without
interruption since June 18 and the named process on our slave has
been up since June 5 and I think that explains why broken domains
seem to hurt us more often.  I like to keep named running without
killing and restarting it as long as humanly possible for the
sake of our customers who should have as continuous a flow of
data as is practical.  The loss of broken domain connectivity is
probably one of the drawbacks to this practice.

	Our last such situation was a domain that listed
localhost or maybe even 127.0.0.1 as the NS record in their SOA.
We could always get them to work if we completely killed named
and restarted it and it would work for precisely 1 TTL unit of
time which in their case was 24 hours.

	Fortunately, they finally fixed it after we got hold of
the right persons, not the listed contact either  GRRR!  

	In this latest saga of why sharp instruments shouldn't be
given to those who don't know any better, I have yet to get a
single response from any contact person much less a resolution of
the problem.

	My sincere thanks to all of you on this list.  When
situations like this arise, there is lots of finger-pointing and
table pounding and "You need to fix this now!" type talk.  Your
answers have given me more backing in my response which is
basically that I have written to the contact addresses and we
can't do much more because it isn't us that is broken even though
it looks that way.

Martin McCormick Stillwater, OK
OSU Center for Computing and Information services Network Operations Group