reverse lookup issue

[Joseph S D Yao]

On Tue, Jul 18, 2000 at 05:05:33PM -0000, David George wrote:
> 
> Trying to get our Primary and secondary DNS for our domain configured and
> set up so we can transition name services in house. So if you want to
> nslookup against the machine you will have to do it by ip 63.214.252.197 .
> Zone transfer seems to be working and normal name resolution seems to be
> working fine however reverse lookup is giving me headaches. I've read the
> error messages and I'm still unable to track this one down.

This seems to be the repeated error of the week.

Your reverse DNS zone file has several instances of "nameserver1" or
"nameserver2" without appended domain names.  You MUST append the
domain names, with a trailing dot: "nameserver1.clearworks.net." or
"nameserver2.clearworks.net.".  The error appears in the SOA and NS
records.

You also gain nothing by having two reverse-DNS records for "196", and
may confuse some programs.  Pick one.

Also, in these lines:

> 196             IN      PTR     clearworks.net.
>                 IN      NS      nameserver2

because the line without a left-hand side appears after "196", you are
saying that this is the name server for that one IP address.  I suspect
that this is not what you had intended.  The NS record, besides needing
a domain name, needs to go up with the other NS record.

Problems in your forward DNS:

> @               IN      SOA     ...
...
>                 IN      MX      5       smtp
>                 IN      NS      nameserver1
>                 IN      NS      nameserver2
>                         IN      A       63.214.252.197
>                         IN      A       63.214.252.198

OK, you have just declared that your domain, presumably
"clearworks.net", has an SOA, an MX, 2 NSes, and 2 IP addresses.

> clearworks.net.         IN      A       63.214.252.196

Oops!  You just declared a third IP address for your domain!

> nameserver1             IN      A       63.214.252.197
> nameserver2             IN      A       63.214.252.198

Hmmm.  These two names have the same addresses that you had earlier
assigned to your domain name.  This could be confusing.  I suspect that
you did NOT intend to assign these addresses to your domain name.

> www                     IN      A       63.214.252.196

So, www has the same IP address as the domain name.  Well, this is
consistent with the error you made in the reverse DNS file, and it is
the - to me inexplicable - thing that many people are doing with their
domain names these days.  This must be why some people think that the
Web  i s  the 'Net.  [gripe, gripe.  ;-}]

> smtp                    IN      A       63.214.252.199

Filling up your MX record.  Good.

-- 
Joe Yao				jsdy at cospo.osis.gov - Joseph S. D. Yao
COSPO/OSIS Computer Support					EMT-B
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