[NTLUG:Discuss] DNS Woes.

[Bob Byron]

There are several things you can do to help determine where the
trouble resides.

1) ping by ip address instead of domain name.  If you cannot 
"ping www.sjbaker.org" and you can "ping 66.137.234.217"
then it would most likely be an issue with the domain name 
servers.
2) Use the tools at hexillion.com.  
http://www.hexillion.com/utilities/
Especially focus on the domain dossier, nslookup and tcpquery, 
in that order.
3) Make a mental note of the how long it takes the ping to return
"unknown host".  It could be a network issue that packets aren't 
making it back to you.  I find this the least likely possibility.  Most
likely 1 & 2 are going to help you isolate your problems.  But, it
is still good to note the return time.

Bob Byron
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Baker" <sjbaker1 at airmail.net>
To: "NTLUG DISCUSS" <discuss at ntlug.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2002 9:47 AM
Subject: [NTLUG:Discuss] DNS Woes.


> 
> I recently purchased my own domain name (sjbaker.org) and following some
> great advice from people on this list, use the 'granitecanyon' free DNS
> service to act as primary and secondard DNS for my site.
> 
> (I'm not very expert in this network stuff - so be gentle with me!)
> 
> So, I set up my machine - and I can happily ping sjbaker.org and access my
> home page from www.sjbaker.org and so on.  I'm using SuSE Linux with a standard
> install - and then a bunch of unneeded services turned off and uninstalled for
> security.
> 
> However, once in a while, I find that I can't reach my machine - even a
> simple 'ping' doesn't work:
> 
> $ ping sjbaker.org
> ping: unknown host sjbaker.org?
> 
> ...I can't reach my site from *anywhere* for hours at a time - then,
> magically it'll come back and work just fine.
> 
> I have the machine that serves the site turned on 24/7 and hooked up
> via DSL with a fixed IP address - and when I get these problems, I
> can reach it just fine if I access it by it's raw IP address - so I
> know the machine is up and running OK.  It's also the firewall for my
> internal network and I have no trouble getting out to the outside world
> through even when it's not accessible as www.sjbaker.org.
> 
> At first, I just assumed that this 'granitecanyon' DNS service (being free)
> might be somewhat flakey - but their site claims they have spectacularly good
> reliability with only an hour or two of downtime over the past several months.
> 
> These outages last for minutes or hours at a time - every couple of weeks
> or so...then they just 'go away' and the site works perfectly for weeks
> until it strikes again.
> 
> Am I doing something wrong?   Is there perhaps something my machine should
> be doing to keep the DNS entries 'fresh' throughout the network?  I doubt
> that I'm getting a whole lot of outside traffic (although from my email,
> I think I'm seeing multiple hits per day on at least some days).
> 
> Any ideas?
> 
> ----------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------------
> Mail : <sjbaker1 at airmail.net>   WorkMail: <sjbaker at link.com>
> URLs : http://www.sjbaker.org
>        http://plib.sf.net http://tuxaqfh.sf.net http://tuxkart.sf.net
>        http://prettypoly.sf.net http://freeglut.sf.net
>        http://toobular.sf.net   http://lodestone.sf.net
> 
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