Dueling DNS Dillema

[david-8uUts6sDVDvs2Lz0fTdYFQ at public.gmane.org (David Kramer)]

On 12/04/2010 10:29 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
>> From: discuss-bounces-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org [mailto:discuss-bounces-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org] On Behalf
>> Of David Kramer
>>
>> We are currently on GoDaddy, a company that I have defended in the past.
>>  We've had a lot of problems with their service, only made more
>> frustrating by their refusal to acknowledge the cold hard evidence I've
>> given them in the way of diagnostics output from a watchdog program I
>> wrote (more info on request).
> 
> Sorry I'm not replying to your question.  But this caught my eye.  
> 
> In the recent couple of months, we've been trying to track down an
> intermittent problem, that's proving exceedingly elusive.  Recently, I
> suspect godaddy might be at fault, but before I say anything about what the
> problem is, or why I might suspect GD, I'd like to know a little bit about
> what your problems are/were?  To see if perhaps it might be similar or
> related to my problems.

The big, straightforward problem, is that the DB server was so slow
pages were timing out.  I know this because my watchdog:
1) Tried the DNS lookup to make sure DNS was OK
2) Tries SNMP on the mail server
3) Tried to access a hidden straight html file on the server
4) Tried to access a hidden simple php file on the server
5) Tried to access a hidden php script that queries the database
6) Tries to access the Joomla front page.

Almost all the time it would fail at the database access.  And they
refused to do anything about it, even when I showed them all the
evidence of what was going on.

The rarer, much stranger problem is that on occasion our url links would
get perturbed in weird ways.  Imagine that we have two domains, and the
documentroot of domain b is under the foo/ directory of domain a.
Domain a is never used; only domain b.  I didn't set it up that way.
On occasion links on the website would magically have /foo/ inserted in
them.  Since the documentroot of b is already under foo/ all links would
be broken on the website until the problem magically clears itself up.
And there was nothing we could do about it.