TTL's and authority (long post)

[Gareth Hastings]

I've registered my own domain which is gshock.co.uk. For the last year
I've had the company (who are uk2.net) who registered it for me run the
DNS servers. I recently wanted to learn about DNS Administration and
BIND so I took over the DNS management and also because I wanted sub
domains and they couldn't provide that for me.

I have Bind 9 setup and running on a Red Hat 7.1 Linux box. I read some
online stuff, bought a book (DNS and BIND 4th Ed. from O'Reily) and went
about setting up my forward and reverse zones (Show below)

Currently I am on a cable network and my IP is DHCP. But this isn't too
much of a problem, it changes once a month maybe...

Ok, on to my problem.

To start with I was given the choice of changing the primary DNS server
to one of my choice and let UK2 run a slave for me. I thought this would
be best in case my cable line dies. The problem I found here was even
though my DNS server was the primary server it seemed like it never got
used. I did a rndc stats and checked my server, it had very few queries
yet my site had a few thousand hits on it. I thought this may be due to
incorrect settings on my part. But connecting to a machine outside of my
network and then using dig to query my name server worked fine. I went
back and changed the secondary DNS server to be hosted on my friend's
machine.

Now my DNS server seems to get used. The questions I have are

1. Why do I get this error when using nslookup to check for MX record
for my domain

]# nslookup
> set query=mx
> www.gshock.co.uk
Server:         194.168.8.100
Address:        194.168.8.100#53

Non-authoritative answer:
www.gshock.co.uk        canonical name = gshock.co.uk.

Authoritative answers can be found from:
gshock.co.uk
        origin = uk2net.com.
        mail addr = hostmaster.gshock.co.uk.
        serial = 2001090222
        refresh = 43200
        retry = 3600
        expire = 604800
        minimum = 86400

2. If I add a new sub domain like files.gshock.co.uk on both name
servers, restart them why can't people resolve this ? They get NXDOMAIN
errors but any machine on my LAN can resolve them fine.



Thanks,

Gareth Hastings




Here are the zone files for my domain plus the domain whois record

# whois -h whois.nic.uk gshock.co.uk
[whois.nic.uk]

   Domain Name: GSHOCK.CO.UK

   Registered For: Gareth Hastings

   Domain Registered By: UK2NET

   Registered on 26-Feb-2000.

   Record last updated on 02-Sep-2001 by <gdhastings at hotmail.com>.

   Domain servers listed in order:

   ASMOD3.D2G.COM                    66.56.248.84
   ASMOD.D2G.COM                     213.122.75.136

   WHOIS database last updated at 14:35:01 04-Sep-2001



-----------------------------------------------------
//db.gshock.co.uk
$TTL 3h
@ IN SOA gshock.co.uk. hostmaster.gshock.co.uk. (
			1	; Serial
			3h	; Refresh
			1h	; Retry
			1w	; Expire
			1h )	; TTL


	IN	NS	asmod3.d2g.com.
	IN	NS	asmod.d2g.com.

	IN	MX 0	asmod.d2g.com.
	IN 	MX 10	asmod2.d2g.com.
	IN	A	66.56.248.84

admin		IN	A	66.56.248.84 // used for apache vhosts
users		IN	A	66.56.248.84 // used for apache vhosts
stats		IN	A	66.56.248.84 // used for apache vhosts

www			IN	CNAME	gshock.co.uk.
mark             	IN	CNAME	ive.d2g.com. // test subdomain
-------------------------------------------------------