[WBEL-users] [Mildly OT] My workaround for beau.org's DNS hussles...

[Vic]

Hi All.

Apologies to those of you who see this as stating the bleeding obvious,
but from the dearth of traffic on this list of late, I don't think I'm the
only one having problems with beau.org's DNS...

The MX record for beau.org is beau.org. Simple.

The A record for beau.org *should* be 199.80.85.113, but is actually being
returned as 204.196.62.12. This appears to be a stale glue record at
ultradns.net.

Beau's stated nameservers (fenris and topdog1) both respond properly - but
they're never asked; all the ultradns machines I've checked all respond
with the 204.blah address.

So my workaround is simply to ensure that my resolver uses fenris and
topdog1, rather than ultradns. In my named.conf file (inside my internal
view, so it only affects me), I have this :-

        zone "beau.org" {
                type forward;
                forwarders {
                        199.80.85.1;
                        209.209.193.98;
                        };
                };

The two IP addresses are fenris and topdog1 respectively - BIND doesn't
seem to like FQDNs here!

The result is that my nameserver checks all requests for beau.org stuff
with the proper nameservers rather than doing a search from the root
nameservers - which means I avoid ultradns, and so get the right values.
Neat, huh?

HTH

Vic.