Re: [vox] DNS issues?

["ME" <dugan@passwalMAPSl.com>]

Mike Simons said:
> On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 08:09:51PM -0500, Mike Simons wrote:
>>   Yes, there were problems with DNS.
>
>   It's unclear if all of the problems were solved...

This comes into to play, in part, by DNS. When a central DNS is asked to
resolve a name, some (seen this on Vaxen running VMS, and an unnamed DNS)
will cache the site that is non-existant, as "non-existant" for XXX
minutes. And then, each time that a new request is made for the
non-existant domain, the cache time in increased back up the the default,
effectively resetting the time.

This is bad. This is not how it should work. I had this happen for a
domain I admin, but was able to get the DNS admins to restart their
services to force a clearing of the cache, and make the DNS re-attempt a
resolution.

Such "hiccups" in DNS can last for as long as 7 days, but most DNS fixes
are filtered down much sooner than that (in hours or minutes.). There was
a case where I was web hosting a domain, and had resolution of that domain
to my web server's IP. After the site was relocated, I had a nice plot of
"hits" that was much like 1/x when hits (vertical) wer mapped against time
(horizontal).

Even as much as 6 months later, I had occasional attempts where people had
somehow resolved the name to still be my IP and not the new one. Some of
these could be simple problems with users modifying their /etc/hosts (or
on other systems other local "hosts" files) and forgetting to "fix" them,
but not all could be attributed to this.

By $0.02.

-ME



-- 
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GCS/CM$/IT$/LS$/S/O$ !d--(++) !s !a+++(-----) C++$(++++) U++++$(+$) P+$>+++
L+++$(++) E W+++$(+) N+ o K w+$>++>+++ O-@ M+$ V-$>- !PS !PE Y+ PGP++
t@-(++) 5+@ X@ R- tv- b++ DI+++ D+ G--@ e+>++>++++ h(++)>+ r*>? z?
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
decode: http://www.ebb.org/ungeek/ about: http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html
  Campus IT(/OS Security): Operating Systems Support Specialist Assistant