Lookup Problem

[Barry Margolin]

In article <92dhvu$ahp at pub3.rc.vix.com>,
Carl Duescher <carld at clublouie.com> wrote:
>
>I forgot to mention that there is also 10 or 12 entries per day about their
>name servers being "lame" in our daemon.log, not sure if that points to
>something or not...

Yes, that's quite likely to be the problem.  You need to work your way down
from the root servers to their domain servers, and check that all the
servers listed in their NS records are responding properly for their
domain.  Include both the servers named in the delegation records and the
ones coming from the primary server.

Another common cause of problems like this is missing glue records.  I've
seen a case with foo.com where the delegation records point to ns1.bar.com
and ns2.bar.com (which don't require glue records because they're in a
different domain), but the NS records in the domain point to ns1.foo.com
and ns2.foo.com.  The latter require glue records because the hostnames are
in the domain they serve, but since the delegation records don't use those
hostnames, no glue records are entered in the parent zone.  If the A
records for nsX.foo.com time out of the cache before the NS records that
point to them, the domain is unusable until the NS records time out.

If you tell us the domain that's causing problems, we can probably figure
out precisely what's wrong.

>> Hello,
>>
>> Here is the situation, once in a while, our customers will call up
>> complaining they can not send e-mail to one of our competitors...when we
>> look into it, we can't do any lookups for them...it simply sits there and
>> finally says can't find blah blah blah.
>>
>> However during this time, if we use another ISP's name servers, they can
>do
>> the lookups just fine.  We can lookup anything else that we want just not
>> our them...once we stop named and restart it, it works...any ideas?


-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at genuity.net
Genuity, Burlington, MA
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