Intermittent NXDOMAIN, Bind 9.2.3 config and PowerDNS problem?

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 02:36:29AM -0700,
 Richard <richard.traveling at gmail.com> wrote 
 a message of 190 lines which said:

> Queries of "agences.fr.lastminute.com" against two servers of the
> French ISP Free.fr,

As a subscriber of Free, and a reader of the various Free users fora,
let me warn you that Free DNS service has a bad reputation. Many Free
subscribers install their own resolver on their machine...

> Note: What confuses me in the response below is the AUTHORITY
> SECTION.  RFCs 1034 and 1035 indicate it is permissible to return an
> SOA record here for negative caching, however it should be for the
> domain of the queried name.  Therefore, I would expect to see an SOA
> record for "lastminute.com.", not "com."

Indeed, lastminute.com's name servers are severely broken.

> (or, if is for "com.", then one of the root servers,

Why the root servers? It should be the ".com" servers.

> Is this bind misconfigured, returning to the public the SOA for
> "com."  as their own lastminute.com server and no NS records?

They have other strange features. My favorite:

% dig @3dns0.pwg.lastminute.com ANY lastminute.com         
;; Got bad packet: extra input data
306 bytes
85 58 85 00 00 01 00 08 00 00 00 03 0a 6c 61 73 
74 6d 69 6e 75 74 65 03 63 6f 6d 00 00 ff 00 01 
c0 0c 00 06 00 01 00 00 02 58 00 53 05 33 64 6e 
...

Clearly, the people at lastminute.com need DNS training.