sendmail/bind question

[Barry Margolin]

In article <bns66g$4gp$1 at sf1.isc.org>, ed plate <eplate at excite.com> wrote:
>Hello everyone:
>
>I've run into a weird problem and I can't say whether it's a bind
>problem or a sendmail problem.
>
>Here are the facts: We're running bind 8.1.2 and sendmail 8.9.3 on
>Solaris 7. I know these are old versions but it's what I have to use
>right now. :-(
>
>As near as I can tell, we're not having a systemic DNS or sendmail
>problem. Most mail is getting sent and delivered.
>
>But, we can't send email to a company named 'graniteinvestment.com'. I
>get a host map lookup deferred in the mailq. The message stays that
>way until it gets removed from the queue by old age. All of this is
>fairly normal.
>
>Thinking they might be having a problem, I used my webmail accounts to
>send test messages to them. I got bounce messages from their server
>right away. So it looks like their server is OK.

The root-dns.com nameservers seem a little weird.  When you ask them for
the NS records of graniteinvestment.com, they send a response with an empty
Answer section.  The NS records are in the Authority section instead.
Similarly, if you ask for ANY, the MX record is in the Answer section, but
the SOA and NS records are in the Authority section.

I'm not sure if this is causing the problem you see, but it seems
suspicious.  I also agree with you that the 10-minute TTL on their MX
record and the 10-minute failure period you're seeing seems like too much
of a coincidence to be unrelated.

% dig graniteinvestment.com ns @ns1.root-dns.com

; <<>> DiG 9.2.0 <<>> graniteinvestment.com ns @ns1.root-dns.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 48069
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 2

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;graniteinvestment.com.		IN	NS

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
graniteinvestment.com.	200	IN	SOA	ns1.root-dns.com. support.temp-url.com. 1001 28800 14400 604800 200
graniteinvestment.com.	86400	IN	NS	ns1.root-dns.com.
graniteinvestment.com.	86400	IN	NS	ns2.root-dns.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns1.root-dns.com.	86400	IN	A	64.7.210.2
ns2.root-dns.com.	86400	IN	A	64.7.210.3


-- 
Barry Margolin, barry.margolin at level3.com
Level(3), Woburn, MA
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