Home / server / Questions / 244470
Accepted
ESW
Asked: 2011-03-08 20:11:05 +0800 CST

Is there any reason a domain would fail to resolve other then the DNS server being the issue?

  • 772

I've got a site I'm having monitored by pingdom and another service, and both have reported outages. One report specifies the IP address could not be resolved -- however, our DNS is handled by theplanet's DNS servers (ns1.theplanet.com, ns2.theplanet.com) and I can only imagine they have tens of thousands of domains -- I can't imagine this woudl be going on for weeks without it being fixed.

Is there something that could cause the IP address to not resolve other then the DNS servers?

domain-name-system

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    If the problem is failure to resolve, then it pretty much has to be a problem with the DNS servers or configuration. It's possible, albeit unlikely, that Pingdom and the unnamed other service have broken caching resolvers. It's also possible, ableit unlikely, that theplanet has broken DNS servers.

    It seems more likely that the DNS zone for your domain might be mis-configured, resulting in random failures. Lame delegation from the GTLD servers, for example, can result in intermittent failure. If you post the actual domain, we could tell you quite a bit more.

    Some things to check:

    dig ns example.com @f.root-servers.net

    This will return a list of additional DNS servers that have been delegated to handle DNS for your TLD. Pick one and send the same query to it. For example:

    dig ns example.com @f.gtld-servers.net

    This should return a list of the servers that handle the DNS for your actual domain. Hopefully it will be ns1.theplanet.com and ns2.theplanet.com.

    Next, move on to sending an A request to each of the listed servers:

    dig a example.com @ns1.theplanet.com
dig a example.com @ns2.theplanet.com

    (Assuming that the GTLD server listed those servers.)

    They should both return the same results, differing only in minor details like TTL.

    • 5