[ale] revisit the web problem again

[Mike Murphy]

another possibility:

win2k caches name lookups by default. This may explain why it works on 
windows, as when it caches, it blatantly ignores the TTL (if they were 
going to have clients act like DNS servers in this regard, they could 
have them act properly, but I digress).

Maybe citigroup managed to hork up their DNS entries at some point? It 
works for me, and when I look at their DNS record, it has a TTL of 30 
(seconds that is). This is really very short. To compare: cnn.com's ttl 
is 24 hours, foxnews.com is 1 hour. amazon.com is 20 minutes. 401k.com 
(which is fidelity's employee benefit site) is 20 minutes or so.

One common post-event management inspired response to putting out a bad 
zone file and thus causing an outage is to shorten your TTLs. This is 
because most nameservers out there will cache this lookup for you for 
the amount of time you have the TTL set, meaning that most clients won't 
be able to get the correct record for that amount of time (assuming your 
dns server has had reason to look up that record since the bad zone file 
is put out). Soooo.... Its likely that win2k might still have the good 
record, while your dns servers actually are holding on to a "bad" one.

Here's my dig output: compare this to what you get from your dns servers 
and see:

  dig mybenefits.csplans.com

; <<>> DiG 9.2.1 <<>> +search mybenefits.csplans.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 30864
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;mybenefits.csplans.com.                IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
mybenefits.csplans.com. 0       IN      A       12.38.217.47

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
mybenefits.csplans.com. 30      IN      NS      csqjm004css.csplans.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
csqjm004css.csplans.com. 30     IN      A       12.38.217.4

;; Query time: 118 msec
;; SERVER: 157.166.2.5#53(157.166.2.5)
;; WHEN: Mon Nov 10 16:34:30 2003
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 98


Mike


Christopher R. Curzio wrote:
> Works fine for me using Firebird 0.7 on Linux. 
> 
> The latest version of Mozilla I have on this machine is build 2003053005,
> and it works there as well. Same for Netscape 4.
> 
> Doesn't sound like a browser issue. 
> 

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Mike Murphy
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