DNS Failing

[toon]

Hi Guys,

Having a few problems hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

Mess around with a lot of websites for work and got a particular domain that has been pointed for a while now to some new web hosting space. I can browse to it fine and the various search engines can crawl the website fine but when I browse to it I get a DNS error page cannot be displayed.

A friend on VM has tried browsing it as well and he has the same issue and hes based the other end of the country. Just seems to be VM. Just dunno what to try to solve it. Its as though VM has stored something their end in a cache and won't update.

My mobile broadband views the site fine on Three. My 3G on my iphone views it fine on O2 as well. Just VM.

Tried pinging it and get could not find host. Very odd.

Thanks guys.

Anyone else experienced this before or have any ideas?

[Kymmy]

Welcome to the forum

If anyone has DNS problems then they usualy swap to OPENDNS (http://www.opendns.com/) as a viable alternative or at very least to properly diagnose the problem.

[heisenberg912]

Not seen it before but should be easy to get around.

Go to www.opendns.com and follow their instructions to change your DNS settings in your router to their addresses instead of the VM ones.

Cheers

Tim

---------- Post added at 10:29 ---------- Previous post was at 10:28 ----------

Welcome to the forum

If anyone has DNS problems then they usualy swap to OPENDNS (http://www.opendns.com/) as a viable alternative or at very least to properly diagnose the problem.

Damn, beat me to it!

[toon]

Wow super fast responses!

Thanks guys.

I'll probably switch to OPENDNS but my only concern is that this will continue to be experienced by other VM users which is quite a few users who should be able to view a site. Ive really not come across an issue like this before.

Very odd.

[Kymmy]

DNS problems with VM tend to be short lived.. there though are a few cases of deliberate blocks they tend to be only on illegal sites

[toon]

Its been about 1 month now. I thought the same but this has lasted longer than expected. Its not an illegal site btw :)

[token]

Not VMs fault this one.

The hostnames of nameservers for that domain aren't themselves resolvable - there are no NS records for the domain that the authoritative nameservers are in, and there are no A records on the nameservers if you query them directly anyway.

Bind (which Virgin don't use) and other resolvers appear not to care too much about it and work around this particular misconfiguration somehow (not looked into exactly how it does it - it wasn't immediately apparent and I haven't looked into it)... The caching DNS platform Virgin run does care however.

So, running nslookup gives us:

> server 194.168.4.100
> set type=ns
> ????.com
Server: 194.168.4.100
Address: 194.168.4.100#53

Non-authoritative answer:
????.com nameserver = ns1.%%%%%.co.uk.
????.com nameserver = ns2.%%%%%.co.uk.

Authoritative answers can be found from:

(at this point we know to ask ns1 and 2.%%%%%.co.uk for hosts in the ????.com domain - so let's get the NS records for that domain for starters)

> %%%%%.co.uk.
Server: 194.168.4.100
Address: 194.168.4.100#53

** server can't find %%%%%.co.uk: SERVFAIL
>

Oh, bugger - we can't.

I obscured the domains out - it didn't seem like you wanted them in the thread - it has made it a bit unreadable though.

[toon]

Hi Token,

Thanks for the reply. Yeah always keen not to publicise the domains etc for various reasons plus boards sometimes dont like it as it could be advertising.

Interesting one that. Not quite sure why that would have happened compared to the other domains setup on that server in past. Its just a standard Plesk system and the others worked successfully.

---------- Post added at 15:27 ---------- Previous post was at 15:21 ----------

Ive done the same nslookup and do get the same. Kind of makes sense just not sure what to do lol now. Great fun more Googling :P

---------- Post added at 15:30 ---------- Previous post was at 15:27 ----------

Also not quite sure how other domains using the same NS's are working and this one isnt. Ah well guess something new to learn.