DNS lookup failures on .org domain

[Cricket Liu]

> I've got Bind 9.1.0 set up on a machine on my home network. It serves a 
> small domain to keep track of local machines ( <10 of them) and caches 
> internet name queries.
> 
> I have an ADSL line, so the name server isn't strictly necessary, but 
> I've got it as a learning excercise as well as to reduce the external 
> line load.
> 
> The problem I have is that some times Bind seems to lose certain 
> domains, commonly the .org ones (off the top of my head I can't remember 
> any others misbehaving). It will resolve them quite happily for a while 
> and then just stop and return lookup errors. Most the time it sorts 
> itself out a while later, otherwise restarting Bind normally fixes the 
> problem for a while.
> 
> My guess was that the .org servers are responding slightly too slowly, 
> Bind was timing out and then caching the error until such time as it 
> tried resolving the domain again and succeeded.

The name servers that serve org are the same set of name servers that
serve com and net.  If they started responding slowly, it would affect
com and net just as much as org.

Have you tried turning on debugging when the problem occurs, or
maybe tracing the DNS activity with tcpdump or ethereal?

cricket

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