Question

[Kevin Darcy]

Brett wrote:

> I fully admit I haven't done much research in to this, but in thise case I'm
> not quite sure what I should be looking at.
>
> I'm having some issues with DNS at the moment. My DNS setup is slightly
> wrong (primary and secordary points to the same system, though different IP
> addrs, this will change eventually...). For the most part it works because
> the DNS is retried multiple times, however what would cause the following:
>
> > forums.ws
> Server:  UnKnown
> Address:  192.168.0.1
>
> DNS request timed out.
>     timeout was 2 seconds.
> *** Request to UnKnown timed-out
> > forums.ws
> Server:  UnKnown
> Address:  192.168.0.1
>
> Name:    forums.ws
> Address:  66.11.167.33
>
> > forums.ws
> Server:  UnKnown
> Address:  192.168.0.1
>
> DNS request timed out.
>     timeout was 2 seconds.
> *** Request to UnKnown timed-out
> > forums.ws
> Server:  UnKnown
> Address:  192.168.0.1
>
> DNS request timed out.
>     timeout was 2 seconds.
> *** Request to UnKnown timed-out
> > forums.ws
> Server:  UnKnown
> Address:  192.168.0.1
>
> Name:    forums.ws
> Address:  66.11.167.33
>
> etc etc etc. for other sites the DNS seems to be much better. Seems like a
> lot of time outs to me. And some implementations of SMTP (i.e. whatever the
> heck hotmail uses in the backend) gives up too quickly and dumps the e-mail.

Well, you haven't really given us a lot of information to go on here. How is
your nameserver configured to resolve Internet names? Does it use forwarding?
Do the queries have to traverse a firewall? How fast and reliable is your
network connection, and particularly your connectivity to the forums.ws
nameservers? How much capacity do you have on your nameserver? If you're
running on a multiprocessor box, are you running a multi-threading capable
version (9) of BIND? Do you have enough RAM? How busy is the box answering
queries?

The only thing out of the ordinary I notice about the forums.ws domain is that,
although the domain is delegated to 2 nameservers, only 1 of those is published
in the NS records, so that one nameserver is going to get the lion's share of
the queries, and if it happens to get bogged down from time to time, queries
will time out.


- Kevin