problems resolving bsdcan.org?

[Mike Silbersack]

On Sun, 25 Jan 2004, Dan Langille wrote:

> I've had reports of people not being able to resolve hostnames for
> bsdcan.org.  I do know that one of the domain's DNS servers is
> offline (m20.unixathome.org).  But the other (nezlok.unixathome.org)
> is up and accepting queries (at least for all my attempts).

> I can't see the problem.  Can you?
>
> Thanks.
> --
> Dan Langille : http://www.langille.org/

AFAIK, older versions of bind used to not handle the dead server case well
at all.  Perhaps people are still running older (unpatched), older
(patched), or other vendor with the same bug DNS servers.  I know this
only because it happened to me back in 1999 or so, and was really
frustrating (even though I still had 2/3 servers working!)

IIRC, these older servers *did* handle the case where they received an
icmp unreachable message fine, and just went on to the next machine; could
you have another computer take over the dead DNS server's IP and run no
services on it?

Mike "Silby" Silbersack