What is --- WRONG --- with my network?

[Jan Grant]

On Fri, 6 May 2005, Fafa Hafiz Krantz wrote:

> 
> Hello boys!
> 
> I just spent a few days doing a make world and kernel.
> My machine is terribly slow. Yet, my network problem hasn't
> gone away. This shows that it wasn't an asynchronisation
> between my world and kernel. I've also compiled io and mem
> into my new kernel.
> 
> Here is my problem description:
> 
> *  My nameserver setup is disfunctional.
> *  My web, mail and fileserver is disfunctional.
> *  I cannot SSH and FTP into certain servers.
> *  I cannot ping my IP from the outside.
> *  My ISP controls the PTR of my reverse DNS lookup.
>    This fails to resolve too.
> 
> PF is disabled.
> 
> My configuration has been running flawlessly for the past
> few months before this strange happening occured. I know for
> a fact that this is not related to a misconfigured rc.conf
> or named.conf. Maybe it is my ISP?

Unfortunately, you appear to be preemptively rejecting the most obvious 
advice, and implicitly asking that people start troubleshooting "from 
the middle". Was your machine up without reboot for months? If so, 
there's no guarantee that the state of named.conf actually reflects the 
state of the previously running named prior to a reboot (alas, I've seen 
this all too often).

Can you begin by posting your fully-functional named.conf and 
resolv.conf? And possibly describing exactly what you mean by "my 
nameserver is dysfunctional"? Do you mean that you cannot resolve 
addresses from your host? Does dig work against your local nameserver 
instance? Can you see any of the root servers with dig? Is named just 
refusing to start? ... and so on.

You'll probably have to be more explicit about "certain servers", too. 
Are they on-site? Off-site? If the latter, and the issue only appears 
with a subset of ssh servers, this may well be indicative of DNS 
problems again, since sshds can be configured to be more or less picky 
about the name resolution of their clients.

Have you tried to resolve the PTR record for your IP address from 
offsite? If this is failing, it's possibly the root cause of a lot of 
your problems, and you'd need to raise it with your ISP.

Cheers,
jan