MavEtJu's Distorted View of the World - 2006-06

Posted on 2006-06-16 11:01:52, modified on 2006-06-16 11:12:42
Tags: Networking, Rant, DNS

One of our users complained that the LawLink website (http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au) was very slow. I checked our traffic report webpage, and it looked fine. But why didn't it work for him? The problem lies in DNS:

[~] edwin@k7>dig lawlink.nsw.gov.au ns
;; ANSWER SECTION:
lawlink.nsw.gov.au.     80018   IN      NS      ns.magna.com.au.
lawlink.nsw.gov.au.     80018   IN      NS      kettle.magna.com.au.
;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns.magna.com.au.        79883   IN      A       203.111.0.10
kettle.magna.com.au.    79887   IN      A       203.111.0.13

Looks fine... FIrst nameserver

[~] edwin@k7>dig @ns1.lawlink.nsw.gov.au www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au a
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au. 0       IN      A       203.3.176.80

Besides a TTL of 0 which is very strange, this one works fine. Next one!

[~] edwin@k7>dig @ns2.lawlink.nsw.gov.au www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au a
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

Unreachable! Now it starts to make sense.

Due to the TTL of 0, which means that the answer never gets cached, and half of the advertised DNS servers unreachable, it will take some time to get an answer for the hostname www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au.

Typical case of having your domains hosted by somebody who has zero clue about how DNS works. Way to go Magna Data!