Peculiar problem with Earthlink's nameservers

[Simon Waters]

Gary Mills wrote:
> 
> Well, we are not using either of those nameservers directly - we are
> using our own nameserver, and it follows the NS chain to find the
> correct nameserver for `bibleworks.com'.  I suppose I'll have to tell
> our user that he can't contact `bibleworks.com' because Earthlink's
> nameserver is broken.

Even if you can't reach one of the earthlink servers for that
domain your nameservers should still contact the other name
servers. A single failure in a DNS server should only cause a
problem if the broken server returns incorrect data.

Everything looks okay from here. The use of a TTL of 300 seconds
for the name servers of domain earthlink.net doesn't inspire
confidence, but it is their bandwidth and servers, and they
probably have rather more of both to burn than I do.

The packet size 461, shouldn't require TCP, but always worth
checking you don'
t firewall it out.

Have you tried restarting you name servers, just in case it is
caching something old and bad - unlikely....

Can you query hearsay and rumor from your name server
successfully?