[Techtalk] dns issue

TraceyC grrliegeek at elenari.net
Thu Jan 12 13:54:55 UTC 2012


Hi Maria,

I did a lookup of your domain's DNS on this site, which I use at work 
quite often:
http://www.dnssy.com/report.php?q=shadlen.org

What it's telling me is that there are 3 nameservers listed with your 
registrar, but only 2 are listed in the NS records at the DNS servers 
for the domain.

Using whois you can see these listed at the registrar:

Name Server:NS1.MYDOMAIN.COM
Name Server:NS2.MYDOMAIN.COM
Name Server:DNS.SHADLEN.ORG

You can see on the report I sent that there is a lookup failure for 
dns.shadlen.org, which matches what you saw on diwebinterface.com. It 
says there is no A record for this host. That is the problem right 
there. You can confirm this yourself using dig (which is what the report 
you copied used).

The following query says "I'm asking about the A record for 
dns.shadlen.org and I am asking the server ns1.mydomain.com."

$ dig a dns.shadlen.org @NS1.MYDOMAIN.COM +short
$

You can see there is no output. This means the server does not have an A 
record for the host.

In addition, there is a mismatch between what your registrar has listed 
as your nameservers and the answers your nameservers provide. This needs 
to be corrected. This is what your nameservers tell me are the NS 
records for your domain:

$ dig ns shadlen.org +short
ns3.mydomain.com.
ns1.mydomain.com.
ns2.mydomain.com.
ns4.mydomain.com.

I can't tell you how this happened, but I can tell you how to fix it. 
You need to determine which are the correct nameservers for your domain. 
Then, make sure that they are all listed with your domain registrar and 
that they all have A records. If you would like me to clarify, I'd be 
happy to.

There's an excellent website that explains the basics of DNS in an easy 
to understand way. It's a gem because a lot of documentation on DNS goes 
into long mind numbing detail on running DNS servers, building DNS 
records from scratch etc. This link is useful for people manage their 
domain records, website maintainers, and anyone with a hosting account:

http://rscott.org/dns/

If you have access to created / edit the DNS zones on the nameservers 
listed above, you can correct the NS and A records yourself. If not, 
whoever controls those nameservers needs to correct the NS and A 
records. If you'd like me to help with that, I'd be happy to, it's what 
I do for a living :)

-- 
TraceyC



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