Unable to query the nameserver

[Eivind Olsen]

--On 5. oktober 2010 20.07.57 +0200 Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> 
wrote:
># nslookup ns1.sharingserver.de 178.63.65.171
> Server:         178.63.65.171
> Address:        178.63.65.171#53
>
> ** server can't find ns1.sharingserver.de: NXDOMAIN

In this case, you're trying to look up ns1.sharingserver.de on the 
nameserver on 178.63.65.171.

> However, another site that _does_ work (with both nameservers on this
> host, not just ns1) shows the same thing:
>
># nslookup ns1.sharingserver.eu 178.63.65.136
> Server:         178.63.65.136
> Address:        178.63.65.136#53
>
> ** server can't find ns1.sharingserver.eu: NXDOMAIN

How do you mean this one is working? It's working just as badly as your 
first example.

I've tried looking up the domain "sharingserver.de" and "sharingserver.eu" 
on both the IP addresses you listed, and in all cases your nameserver 
replies with NXDOMAIN - it doesn't know about those domains.

> I don't see a named or bind log, but messages is clean of such things.

I don't think you've mentioned which OS you're running, and whether you run 
a bundled or self-compiled version of BIND, so I'm not sure where it puts 
its logs by default. Do you see _any_ mention of "named" in your 
/var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog or similar files if you restart BIND?
How to restart it depends on your distribution, whether you use bundled 
BIND etc. It might be "service named restart" on one distribution, and 
"rndc stop" followed by "/usr/local/sbin/named" on another, or 
"/etc/rc.d/named restart" on yet another.. And I'm not good at guessing :D

Anyway - if you don't see a single line about "named" in the logs even 
after restarting it, you need to look into fixing that, as I'm guessing 
BIND is then really trying to give you some nice information in the logs 
but it can't..

Regards
Eivind Olsen