[PLUG-TALK] A plea for assistance from any Comcast customers

Richard Powell plug at hackhawk.net
Sun Jul 17 15:33:14 UTC 2016


On 7/16/2016 8:39 PM, Russell Senior wrote:
>>>>>> "Richard" == Richard Powell <plug at hackhawk.net> writes:
> Richard> On 7/16/2016 4:32 PM, Russell Senior wrote:
>>>>>>>> "Richard" == Richard Powell <plug at hackhawk.net> writes:
> Richard> On 7/16/2016 12:01 PM, Richard Powell wrote:
>>>>> What I'm asking first is, can any Comcast customers test the
>>>>> following websites to see if they are resolving?  I'd like to know
>>>>> what percentage of Comcast customers are not able to see the
>>>>> hostpond.com domain names.
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.hostpond.com https://spam.hostpond.com
>>>>> http://apple.hostpond.com/webmail
>>>>> http://tilikum.hostpond.com/webmail https://portal.hostopnd.com
> Richard> Thanks to everyone who rant a test on this.  I really really
> Richard> appreciate it.  Asking my non-techie customers to test is
> Richard> really not a reasonable option.  But I do know many of them are
> Richard> complaining about the problem, so that's enough.
>>> Asking whois hostpond.com, I get
>>>
>>> Name Server: NS1.HOSTPOND.NET Name Server: NS3.HOSTPOND.NET
>>>
>>> and both of those have glue records:
>>>
>>> whois ns1.hostpond.net:
>>>
>>> Server Name: NS1.HOSTPOND.NET IP Address: 8.3.44.4
>>>
>>> whois ns3.hostpond.net:
>>>
>>> Server Name: NS3.HOSTPOND.NET IP Address: 8.3.44.3
>>>
>>> (both registered through ENOM)
>>>
>>> a dig www.hostpond.com +trace (which looks it up from root
>>> nameservers, see the full output), ends up with:
>>>
>>> www.hostpond.com.  300 IN CNAME hostpond.com.  hostpond.com.  300 IN
>>> A 8.3.44.38 hostpond.com.  300 IN NS ns3.hostpond.net.  hostpond.com.
>>> 300 IN NS ns1.hostpond.net.
>>>
>>> That all looks right.  But, trying to resolve www.hostpond.com from a
>>> Comcast nameserver (DNS /etc/resolv.conf below) fails:
>>>
>>> # Interface wan nameserver 75.75.75.75 nameserver 75.75.76.76 search
>>> hsd1.or.comcast.net.  # Interface wan6 nameserver 2001:558:feed::1
>>> nameserver 2001:558:feed::2
>>>
>>> I'd try calling back.  You will get a different person.  Explain what
>>> is happening as clearly as possible (e.g. Comcast nameservers aren't
>>> resolving your domain).
> Richard> I've spoke with 3 different people so far.  4 if you include
> Richard> the manager.  None of them have offered any help.  They say
> Richard> they can't see a problem and refuse to escalate the issue.
>
> You mean, they can load those pages?  They are probably asking a
> different nameserver.
>
> You might try emailing hostmaster at comcast.com.  I'm not optimistic, but
> anyone reading that email address might have more of a clue that the
> phone answerers you are talking to now.
>
> How long has the problem been present?

It was more than 85 hours that they weren't resolving.  It seems to be
resolving properly this morning (after 4 days).

I'm conflicted.  Part of me feels guilty for posting the plea for
assistance on this list, when it could be as simple as Comcast
respecting some relic of a TTL and refusing to update their records for
4 days.  But I'm still angry that they couldn't simply refresh their
cache when asked if this truly was the case.  This effected hundreds of
small businesses.

I've felt for a long time that many of the implementations of DNS have
been extremely lame.  So many instances where one nameserver goes down,
and the second nameserver is not queried by caching servers, or by the
client PC/device.  Seriously, what's the point in having backup DNS
servers if they are not used when the primary is failing?  And, if a
cached nameserver is failing entirely, why on earth would you not go
back to the root servers and refresh your cache?  Google and many others
have obviously figured this out, why can't Comcast?

sigh.

Thanks again to those who assisted with this.  Very much appreciated.
Richard





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