DNS problems and UUNET?

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, John Abreau wrote:

> I'm starting to get some heat over some DNS problems at ITworld.com. Many
> of our people use mindspring to dial in, and mindspring's DNS servers
> aren't resolving our domain. I've checked our master DNS server, and
> everything seems fine there. I can't think of anything else to check.
>
> A few people suggested that the problem might be related to a recent
> outage at UUNET, but my boss wants some hard evidence to show his boss,
> and as far as his boss is concerned, what I've passed on so far is just
> vague speculation.
>
> Who else has been having these problems? Can anyone identify specifically
> what's been happening, or at least help to prove (or disprove) that the
> problem is widespread? If I can point my boss to a specific trouble-ticket
> describing the problem, that would be ideal. Or if nothing else, maybe a
> sufficiently large set of anecdotes of others having troubles this week
> would be of some help.
>
> For what it's worth, our ISP is CERFnet; I'm not sure how CERFnet relates
> to UUNET, but maybe it will prove relevant.

What I can definitively tell you that, while there was a problem,
"dig blu.org any any"
would not show any mx record, so there was no mail server to talk to.  Now
that the problem is apparently fixed, at least from a MediaOneRRATT
system, I am seeing the MX record.

What I can speculate on is that some other (larger, intermediate) server
was not passing along and cacheing that mx record, though it was
processing the other records fine.  So even though blu.org's dns table
showed the mx record (according to Jabr, I didn't check), senders were not
even getting that far, because some other DNS server denied knowing about
us.

Today's output of said command:

[david at kramer texinfo-3.12h]$ dig blu.org any any

; <<>> DiG 8.2 <<>> blu.org any any
;; res options: init recurs defnam dnsrch
;; got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 4
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 3
;; QUERY SECTION:
;;      blu.org, type = ANY, class = ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
blu.org.                2d23h27m56s IN A  216.235.254.230
blu.org.                5d16h24m47s IN NS  tarnhelm.blu.org.
blu.org.                5d16h24m47s IN NS  ns2.usdatacenters.com.
blu.org.                5d16h24m47s IN NS  ns3.usdatacenters.com.
blu.org.                5d16h24m47s IN MX  10 blu.org.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
blu.org.                5d16h24m47s IN NS  tarnhelm.blu.org.
blu.org.                5d16h24m47s IN NS  ns2.usdatacenters.com.
blu.org.                5d16h24m47s IN NS  ns3.usdatacenters.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns2.usdatacenters.com.  44m36s IN A     216.235.240.12
ns3.usdatacenters.com.  8m51s IN A      209.6.61.3
blu.org.                2d23h27m56s IN A  216.235.254.230

;; Total query time: 9 msec
;; FROM: kramer to SERVER: default -- 24.128.60.8
;; WHEN: Fri Jan 19 15:30:13 2001
;; MSG SIZE  sent: 25  rcvd: 223


-------------------------------------------------------------------
DDDD   David Kramer                   http://thekramers.net
DK KD
DKK D  Football is not a contact sport; it is a collision sport.
DK KD  Dancing is a contact sport.              --Vince Lombardi
DDDD



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