strange DNS problem

[Tani Hosokawa]

I'm having a problem doing a lookup on a customer's ISP's nameserver.

Nov 16 14:55:53 avarice named[30641]: ns_resp:
query(www2.domain.com) All possible A RR's lame

I can do a lookup on www.domain.com, and my nameserver returns it from its
cache.  If I try to look up www2.domain.com, it just hangs -- I got the
above error in my syslog output.  If I kill named and restart it, it comes
back up but then disappears shortly thereafter(?????).

Even stranger, when I restart it, I am able to do 1 lookup.  After that,
everything hangs.  It's absolutely bizarre.  For example, I do an
'nslookup -type=SOA' and get a response.  After that, I can't do an A
record lookup on www. or www2.  If I then kill named, start it again, I
can do a lookup on www., but after that I can't even redo the SOA lookup
on the domain, nor can I check www2.

ns1.sprint.ca also appears to have the same problem -- it can only do a
lookup on www.domain.com, but the other (www2) it returns "Non-existent
host/domain".  ns1.home.com also can't find it.  Presumably, this is
because they did their one lookup and are now locked out.  However, the
customer who owns the domain can reach it, and the hosting company that's
hosting it also claims that everything is OK.  I'm being blamed for not
setting everything up on my end correctly (all I'm installing is a simple
CGI script) but this obviously isn't my fault.  Has anyone ever seen
behaviour like this?

---
tani hosokawa
river styx internet