Host name lookup fails

[Bill Moseley]

Dan,

What was curious, I thought, and what I don't understand, is why
sunsite.berkeley.edu was asking ns2.berkeley.edu for rain.org's MX, and (at
least with nslookup on sunsite.berekely.edu) nslookup was returning:
   *** ns2.Berkeley.EDU can't find rain.org.: Server failed

Yet, when I used dig from mardy.hank.org and queried ns2.berkeley.edu for
rain.org's MX it returned status: NOERROR plus it returned flags: qr rd ra;

So rain.org's MX was in ns2.berekely.edu's cache yet for some reason
sunsite.berkeley.edu was unable to do the MX lookup.

It makes me wonder if there isn't some weirdness in sunsite's (Solaris 2.6)
resolver library since neither nslookup or sendmail was able to succeed.

Oh well, it seems to be working now, so I can only wonder what was causing
the problem.

Thanks very much for taking time to respond, Dan.



At 11:16 AM 09/11/00 -0400, McNair, Dan wrote:
>Bill, here are some things that I noticed:
>
>;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
>rain.org.               4H IN NS        ns1.rain.org.
>rain.org.               4H IN NS        ns2.rain.org.
>rain.org.               4H IN NS        coyote2.rain.org.
>
>
>The ns1.rain.org. and ns2.rain.org. servers responded just fine.
>coyote2.rain.org. did not respond.  So I tried a lookup on coyote.rain.org,
>and it responded fine.
>
>So maybe there is a mistake, and the third nameserver (coyote2.rain.org.)
>should actually be coyote.rain.org.  Or, maybe there is a mistake in the A
>record for coyote2.rain.org, or somebody forgot to start the nameserver on
>that machine.
>
>I tried both dig and nslookup on 128.32.136.12, and got answers with both
>tools.


Bill Moseley
mailto:moseley at hank.org