Weird nslookup problem (from O'Reilly book, page 84)

[Barry Margolin]

In article <3825b19a.1151259 at news.swbell.net>,
Chris <chris at tourneyland.com> wrote:
>What I'm trying to find is www.tourneyland.net. My default domain is
>tourneyland.net, and nslookup www works fine. nslookup
>www.tourneyland.net gatekeeper.dec.com fails though, as does nslookup
>www.tourneyland.net 151.164.1.8 (that's my ISP's name server). What's
>strange is that doing the same nslookups with mail.tourneyland.net, or
>other hosts works fine. Only www fails.

gatekeeper.dec.com has an incorrect CNAME record cached:

www.tourneyland.net.	813	CNAME	hossie.tourneyland.net.

You would have seen this if you used "dig" rather than the inferior
"nslookup" in your troubleshooting.  That record should time out in about
10 minutes.

I tried your ISP's server and it worked OK.  I also got the correct answer
with my local server.

However, I noticed that the domain I see when I query your server is not
quite the same as what you posted.  Your actual SOA record has serial
number 1, but you posted serial number 199909283.  Your secondary server,
bessie, is down at the moment.  It's possible that the bad CNAME record was
coming from it; if you changed your serial number from 199909283 to 1,
bessie would not have done a zone transfer (zone transfers happen only when
the serial number increases).

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
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