Weird DNS problem

[Barry Finkel]

Elias <elias at streamyx.com> wrote:

>Hi guys,
>I've actually got more of a DNS question here rather than BIND. I'm
>having problems resolving certain domains when using MS DNS but have no
>problems resolving them using BIND. I wanted to conclude that it was a
>weird MS problem but when I tried the same MS machine on a different
>ISP line, it works. So now I'm not sure if the problem is actually a
>DNS (or MS) related issue or is an ISP related issue.
>
>Microsoft DNS :
>Line A (ISP A) - Fail, not able to resolve certain domains
>Line B (ISP B) - No problems resolving any domain
>
>BIND running on Fedora :
>Line A (ISP A) - No problems
>Line B (ISP B) - No problems
>
>
>Eg of the problematic sites are www.ferrari.com and www.yahoo.co.jp.
>When I look them up using the MS machine, I can lookup the NS records
>and I can query each auth server to get an answer (so routing's not an
>issue right), but somehow when querying for the www records, it still
>fails. Now if I swap the MS machine with a Fedora machine running BIND,
>everything's beautiful. From here I concluded that its not the line/ISP
>issue. However, if I move the MS machine over to a different ISP's
>line, it goes back to normal and both the sites can be resolved. Weird
>right?
>
>Any help or suggestions greatly2 appreciated.   
>
>p/s : both the MS and Fedora machines were directly connected to the
>Internet via a router with no filtering, no NAT'ing and no firewalling.
>And both machines were assigned the same set IP addresses (not at the
>same time of course) during the tests


First, it is always a good idea to limit the length of your lines.
I reformatted your line-long paragraphs.

Second, what version of MS DNS are you using?  As it is not BIND,
you do not have the dig utility available.  You can try the "-d2"
option on nslookup to get more diagnostic data.  When you have no
problems, are you sure that the same query is being made to the same
servers?  Is any result being returned from the local DNS cache instead
of from the remote DNS server?  I know that nslookup is not a good
diagnostic utility, but it is better than nothing.  I know that there
are multiple versions of nslookup available, and the one in Fedora is
different from the one supplied by MS.  Try the tests again, running
the same nslookup commands, and report the results.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry S. Finkel
Computing and Information Systems Division
Argonne National Laboratory          Phone:    +1 (630) 252-7277
9700 South Cass Avenue               Facsimile:+1 (630) 252-4601
Building 222, Room D209              Internet: BSFinkel at anl.gov
Argonne, IL   60439-4828             IBMMAIL:  I1004994