Competitor's DNS misconfig, or mine?

Mike Grommet

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Aug 21, 1998, 3:00:00 AM8/21/98

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Hi guys.

I have recently transferred several virtual domains to another web hosting
service, but my nameserver does not see the domains on look up (none of the
ones I've transferred to this one hosting service). The interesting thing
is that I have transferred other domains to other hosts and havent had this
problem so I'm having difficullty accepting that its my problem, but hey it
could be I guess. I will outline what I see below:

ok heres a for instance:

I do a whois chesserrealty.com from my nameserver and I get
Record last updated on 21-Jul-98.
Record created on 17-Oct-96.
Database last updated on 20-Aug-98 04:21:41 EDT.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.GRNCO.NET 208.21.151.1
NS2.GRNCO.NET 208.21.151.2

ok, so then I do a nslookup for www.chesserrealty.com from my name server I
get
No match for "WWW.CHESSERREALTY.COM".

of course I cant ping em or traceroute them since I cant look them up :)

Now the interesting part:

I use nslookup off of another server... like this:
ns# nslookup www.chesserrealty.com ns2.mci.net
Server: ns2.mci.net
Address: 204.70.57.242

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: www.chesserrealty.com
Address: 208.21.151.2

so now this is weird. these domains have been transferred for quite a long
long time.
I got to looking in my log files and I see lots of entries like this:

Aug 15 14:26:56 ns named[11593]: "151.21.208.in-addr.arpa IN NS" points to a
CNAME (ns1.grnco.net)

Just out of curiosity, I ping ns1.grnco.net and I get
ns# ping ns1.grnco.net
PING hal.grnco.net (208.21.151.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 208.21.151.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=52 time=124.032 ms
64 bytes from 208.21.151.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=52 time=123.728 ms
64 bytes from 208.21.151.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=52 time=123.395 ms

so this is what I _think_ is happening:
the name server @ grnco is really named hal.grnco.net, from the lookup and
pinging.
ns1 is a cname for hal...
the reverse records in their in-addr.arpa mapping is pointing the NS entries
to a CNAME
which is a no-no from what I've seen / read.

Would my name server be refusing their "broadcasts" due to this?

what else can I try or look at?

Mike Grommet
System Admin, and all around nice guy
Internet Solutions, Inc.
mgro...@insolwwb.net

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Doug White

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Aug 23, 1998, 3:00:00 AM8/23/98

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On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, Mike Grommet wrote:

> I have recently transferred several virtual domains to another web hosting
> service, but my nameserver does not see the domains on look up (none of the
> ones I've transferred to this one hosting service). The interesting thing
> is that I have transferred other domains to other hosts and havent had this
> problem so I'm having difficullty accepting that its my problem, but hey it
> could be I guess. I will outline what I see below:

I assume that you were previously serving DNS for the domains. Did you
remove them from your DNS zone files, increase the serial number, and
restarted named?

> ok, so then I do a nslookup for www.chesserrealty.com from my name server I
> get
> No match for "WWW.CHESSERREALTY.COM".
>
> of course I cant ping em or traceroute them since I cant look them up :)

> so now this is weird. these domains have been transferred for quite a

> long long time. I got to looking in my log files and I see lots of
> entries like this:
>
> Aug 15 14:26:56 ns named[11593]: "151.21.208.in-addr.arpa IN NS" points to a
> CNAME (ns1.grnco.net)

You cannot have a reverse record pointing to a CNAME, it must point to an
A record. Fix your zone file and restart named.

If you don't already have it the O'Reily book 'DNS and BIND' is amust-buy
for DNS admins.

Doug White | University of Oregon
Internet: dwh...@resnet.uoregon.edu | Residence Networking Assistant
http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite | Computer Science Major

mike grommet

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Aug 23, 1998, 3:00:00 AM8/23/98

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Doug,

thanks for the reply.

I do have dns and bind, and am quite aware of the cname issue
in reverse lookups, but apparently my competitor isnt :)

In any case, things "mysteriously" started working so I would assume that
my competitor finally figured it out. thanks again!