[PLUG] Spotty DNS Resolution

Aaron Ten Clay aaron at madebyai.com
Sat Oct 14 23:12:08 UTC 2006


On Saturday 14 October 2006 15:44, Daniel Hedlund wrote:
> I am trying to track down the cause of some spotty DNS service, which
> has recently started causing me to lose emails from some people.
<snip>
> I'm using Dotster as my registrar and they require that I provide two
> fully qualified hostnames for my DNS.  I only have one DNS server so I
> provide the registrar with a hostname that doesn't have a DNS server on
> it, using another static IP address I own, but not on the same network.

This is likely your problem. Most DNS servers these days, it seems, give up 
after about 2000ms if they can't get the info you want. Especially when just 
doing forwards. The DNS scheme is that you have multiple servers so if one is 
down/unreachable you can keep trying all the servers for a zone. Since most 
software doesn't seem to do that anymore, your listing a non-DNS server as a 
server for your domain is likely the cause of the problem. Resolvers are 
probably trying that one first, and giving up.

In cases where I've had no other options, I've run a second IP on one host and 
listed both IPs as the two nameservers for a domain. No redundancy, but at 
least all DNS requests are satisfied if the host is up (and any services on 
that host would be down if the host were down, anyway, negating any benefit 
to redundancy)

If all else fails, you could use everydns.net for a secondary server. I've 
used them for a while now without any problems. (Free/donation requested 
service)

-Aaron
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