Our ISP's name server went down and brought our DNS down

[Brent Bolin]

A couple of days ago our ISP's name servers went down.

This brought our DNS for addresses in the world down also.  Local names
worked fine.

Here is the dig info -

;; got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 4
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 3
;; QUERY SECTION:
;;      www.dspi.com, type = A, class = IN

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.dspi.com.           4H IN A         216.233.10.162

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
dspi.com.               4H IN NS        auth1.ns.eni.net.
dspi.com.               4H IN NS        auth2.ns.eni.net.
dspi.com.               4H IN NS        auth3.ns.eni.net.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
auth1.ns.eni.net.       4H IN A         205.214.45.6
auth2.ns.eni.net.       4H IN A         155.229.2.181
auth3.ns.eni.net.       4H IN A         155.229.126.67

;; Total query time: 58 msec
;; FROM: pheonix.dbprograms.com to SERVER: default -- 216.233.79.154
;; WHEN: Thu Jun 15 09:43:41 2000
;; MSG SIZE  sent: 30  rcvd: 172

What is the order that our DNS looks for addresses?.  Dosen't it look
for the name server that is authorative for that domain?

When we do a query does it get the answer from the servers listed by
whois?

Our ISP's DNS servers are not configured in named.boot files.  DNS is
primed only from root servers.

Does anybody know why this happed?

FreeBSD 3.2
Bind 8.1.2

btb