[NTLUG:Discuss] DNS Woes.

[Steve Baker]

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