The Blog of Harald

Some of my regular visitors recently complained that my site was down. Well, actually, it is up, but I’m having strange DNS issues.

I used to have three nameservers, in three separate physical locations; one of them is even on a separate ISP. However, two of my three nameservers are down. ns1.cfrq.net is now in my basement (switched off) due to the upcoming acquisition, and ns3.cfrq.net is down while the host site deals with floods etc. after the blackout.

This would normally be ok, since I still have one functioning nameserver. There was a bit of confusion between myself and the InterNIC over it’s _address_, but that has been cleared up. However, it seems that several places (notably both sympatico and rogers@home) can’t seem to contact the one remaining namserver (ns2.cfrq.net, 216.191.155.143), even though the glue records for the zone (in the GTLD servers) are correct, and the machine is up and running. I’d appreciate it if anyone could enlighten me (FWIW, I’m probably missing something obvious :-).

For now, I’ve reprogrammed the local firewall to a) answer to ns1.cfrq.net’s address, and b) redirect DNS queries to ns2.cfrq.net. This is the power of linux with iptables at work; bi-directional NAT is four lines of my firewall script :-). I won’t be able to do this forever, but with any luck ns3.cfrq.net will be in service again shortly, and I’ll figure out what’s wrong with the ISP nameservers.

In the meantime, I’m still looking for a home for ns1.cfrq.net, but that’s another story…