creeping death ???

[Kevin Darcy]

Mark.Andrews at isc.org wrote:

> >
> > Tommy McLeod wrote:
> >
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > we have a wee problem,
> > >
> > > we provide Name Services for iea-shc.org. I can query this from almost
> > > anywhere in the world (can get SOA's etc), however, I have some people
> > > trying to get to www.iea-shc.org from finland, denmark and now Sweden
> > > who are unable to resolve anything, they cant even get soa's for the
> > > domain.
> > >
> > > I have checked this from the states, malaysia, the netherlands etc etc
> > > and they all seem to be able to et the required info and resolve the
> > > hosts, I have come up through the root .org servers and they have also
> > > provided the correct information.
> > >
> > > Heres the funny part, we serve ns requests for vuw.ac.nz, the affected
> > > servers in finland and denmark can resolve those perfectly, they get
> > > soa's etc but still cant get iea-shc.org ... but the rest of the world
> > > can ... hte DNS is on the same box, UDP/53 traffic is not firewalled or
> > > blocked in any way, and the bind version is 8.3.3
> > >
> > > Any ideas ???
> >
> > The only thing that comes to mind is that the .org servers aren't going to
> > provide glue records since the delegations in this case are in a ccTLD
> > (which the .org servers don't serve), whereas when these Scandinavian
> > servers query something in vuw.ac.nz, they get glue records all of the way
> > down the delegation chain. If the Scandinavian nameservers aren't smart
> > enough to re-query for glue records, they'll get stuck. They'd have to be
> > pretty dumb, though, and if they were _that_ dumb, they'd be having
> > trouble with a lot more domains than just iea-shc.org...
> >
> >
> > - Kevin (former Vic student)
>
>         Well DNS error are not usually geographically related.  All
>         I can think of is that there is some data related link layer
>         error and all the sites involved transit a common path.

A link layer error that affects *smaller* packets, perhaps (since the
iea-shc.org referral, unlike a vuw.ac.nz referral, contains no glue records)???


- Kevin