Very odd problems.

[Kevin Darcy]

terraworld.net has problems. The domain is delegated only to
"earth.terraworld.net" and "sol.terraworld.net", but the NS records they
give out for the zone are "ns1.terraworld.net" and "ns2.terraworld.net". If
those A records happen to time out of a cache before the NS records do,
then there is no way to resolve anything in the domain while the NS records
still exist. That's why restarting the cache fixes the problem.

oswego.net appears to have different problems. It is delegated to
dns.greensoft.com and ns.oswego.net. dns.greensoft.com is not answering
authoritatively for the domain. ns.oswego.net is answering authoritatively,
but is giving out a bogus "ns.owego.net" (note no "s" in "owego") NS for
the zone in addition to the non-authoritative dns.greensoft.com. Apparently
someone mistyped.


- Kevin

Bryan McClendon wrote:

> I am having what I consider to be strange problems with Bind at our
> site.
>
> The Long story:
> First the setup. We were using Bind 4 for a few years on Redhat Linux
> 5.x and did not have any problems with it. A few months ago we purchased
> a new server and installed RH 6.2 on the machine, which comes with bind
> 8. I moved all of our old zones files over, did the named.conf by hand,
> and added a $TTL to the top of our zone files. This seemed to work fine.
> Then about a week later one of our customers called and said she could
> not send mail to a rival ISP in town (terraworld.net). From her
> description it sounded like she was unable to resolve the mail host. So
> I dropped to a shell and used the 'host' command to lookup their domain
> and got "Host not found". Well I told her their DNS was down, and
> figured that was that. Well she called back in about 20 minutes and told
> me that their tech says everything is fine. So I again checked to see if
> it was down, which it appeared to be, then went to www.traceroute.org to
> see if it would work from various sites. Invariably, all the cgi
> traceroutes I tried were able to lookup the domain so I knew it was
> something with us. The first thing I did was I restarted named, and then
> tried to lookup the host again, and this time it worked. Ack!
>
> I worked on this problem off and on for the next two weeks and never
> solved it. I tried new memory, switching CPU's, new MB, and upgrading to
> the latest bind and 2.2 kernel to no avail. I don't know why, but when
> it happens I have to restart named. To solve the problem I have setup a
> cron that restarts named every 2 hours, nasty I know but what can I do?
>
> See the configs for our setup look here:
> http://morpheus.par1.net/~gspot/named.par1.net
> http://morpheus.par1.net/~gspot/named.conf
> In fact, all of the relevant files are there, knock yourself out.
>
> If only it stopped there.
>
> I just recently setup a linux server for a different ISP at
> (oswego.net). Again I used RH 6.2 and took his old named files from bind
> 4 and set it up on bind 8. I set him up with single A records for each
> IP and then used multiple CNAME entries to have various other names
> point to each IP. This problem is a little different. Everything seems
> to work fine locally, but from my site I was having trouble resolving
> some of his names. I didn't understand why, but after reading the HOWTO
> decided to just change every entry to an A record. It seemed to work
> okay over the weekend, but today he called me and said he couldn't
> resolve his mail server from his place of work (he has a day job at a
> bank). I tried resolving it myself, but I couldn't. Hrm. Ok so I
> telneted into his machine and tried to resolve it there, it worked fine.
> Then the last thing I tried, I went to a few places on
> www.traceroute.org and wouldn't you know it, they resolved his mail
> server fine as well. I restarted my name server and then it was able to
> resolve his name also, but not until a large delay had passed. (It took
> 2 mins maybe..?)
> As of right now he still cannot resolve that mail server name from his
> office at the bank, which uses yet a 3rd ISP. I have a feeling if I were
> to have access to that ISP, and I restarted the name server, it would
> work.
> Relevant files here:
> http://morpheus.par1.net/~gspot/oswego/named.conf
> http://morpheus.par1.net/~gspot/oswego/named.oswego.net
> Others are there too...
>
> The thing is, what the heck is going on here? I am thoroughly confused.
> Is this some kind of strange thing with RH? If so, why is the bank
> having that same problem? If so, why is it always just happening to a
> few domains? What can I do to resolve this, or maybe get more info? Im
> not opposed to any suggestions, I'm at the end of my rope.
>
> Bryan McClendon
> Parsons Internet
> jidar at par1.net