Domain Name Servers And You: Thoughts On Recent Intimacy

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

There was a birthday party for my mother-in-law Wednesday that sort of ate the day, and Thursday we flew back from Old Europe. The World’s Youngest Blogger did really well. He had slept most of the flight over, and was in full charm mode on the way home. A bottle on the descent got him through the pressure adjustment.

Then I discover that the domain registration, which was payed on 02 September, has involved some Internet Protocol address shift, and the Domain Name Server updating has the blog substantially unreachable. Renewing the domain has not been problematic previously. The degree to which some of this blogs ‘fans’ may have ‘helped’ is wildly unclear. Ground truth in such questions is darn hard to obtain, even in good conditions. We’ll see about registering the domain for longer; about the only thing you can do to smooth matters is lower the frequency of renewal. So we’ll do that.

Thanks to Instapundit and the bazillion readers on Twitter who’ve shown support.

34 comments

  2. Yesterday you had a lot of weird DNS stuff. Today you experienced what to me looks like a DDOS attack. Your site was too busy for more than an hour? If you’re not at least considering these incidents to be malicious, you’re way to naive to comment on US politics. Also backup everything on DVD right away. I’d hate to lose your site just before the election.

  7. Next time this happens (d4+1 years from now) we’ll post information on how to reset your DNS pointers so you won’t have to wait so long. ~__^

  8. I know how to do that already but I was being lazy. I flushed dns but it didn’t help so I thought oh well it will be back soon if it’s just a DNS issue ( I could see the feed) but it seemed to take longer than usual.

  9. I was confused – I think it was Wednesday, the blog disappeared! I figured it was something fixable, and all I had to do was be patient. It’s nice to have been right about something technical, probably for the first and last time in my life.

  10. Your forward DNS points as follows:

    $ host theothermccain.com
    theothermccain.com has address 50.28.86.160

    Your reverse DNS points as follows:

    $ host 50.28.86.160
    160.86.28.50.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer host2.theothermccain.com.

    But host2.theothermccain.com doesn’t point anywhere:

    $ host host2.theothermccain.com
    Host host2.theothermccain.com not found: 2(SERVFAIL)

    By intent? Or FUBAR?

  16. Well, if you read the post, it’s clear they do consider that to be a possibility (re “fans” “helping”)

    Anyway, I’m glad the blog is operational again.

  24. Unfortunately, where I live, I only get 2 hours. And those are not live, but he archives his shows. Which is nice in a pinch.

  26. Like a famous man once said: “If a man doesn’t have network chops – maybe you should just let him go.”

    Or maybe keep him and hire a network chopper.

  27. One problem is this, and it isn’t YOUR fault, it is that you are with a brain dead hosting operation:

    According to whois:

    Name Server: NS1.THEOTHERMCCAIN.COM
    Name Server: NS2.THEOTHERMCCAIN.COM

    Those are the dns servers listed for theothermccain.com

    Server Name: NS1.THEOTHERMCCAIN.COM
    IP Address: 50.28.86.160

    Server Name: NS2.THEOTHERMCCAIN.COM
    IP Address: 50.28.86.160

    So whois shows the same IP address for both primary and secondary dns.

    Then there’s this:
    [email protected] :~> host NS1.THEOTHERMCCAIN.COM
    Host NS1.THEOTHERMCCAIN.COM not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

    [email protected]:~> host NS2.THEOTHERMCCAIN.COM
    Host NS2.THEOTHERMCCAIN.COM not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

    So the actual hostnames of the DNS servers don’t exist anywhere in DNS.

    I don’t know who manages the actual zone files for your domain but I imagine it is your hosting company. They are incompetent. They are using the same IP address (and I don’t care if they load balance to multiple servers), they should have the two name servers on different networks and the nameservers names should be resolvable.

    You know, with all the denial of services going on with conservative websites, I am tempted to deploy a hardened infrastructure for conservative sites that know what they are doing and want a hosting provider that knows what they are doing and will protect them from cock-ups and denial of service attacks. It’s kind of what I do for a living and at one time I managed the network for the number one DoSed site on the Internet (but that was back in “the day” before the dot-bomb went off).

  28. It sucks to have shadow enemies, but that is how hyenas and liberals work.

    Until there are enough of them, as Russians, Chinese, Germans, Cubans, North Koreans, Vietnamese and many others know oh so well. I have to wonder what the non-partisan independents of those countries think now?

  30. Yes, their DNS setup is very sloppy. They should pull a Trump. They don’t have to use their hosting service for their DNS service. I certainly don’t for my site.

  31. Fact is, we’re more into content generation than server management. And, while I’m competent on a few admin tasks, I’m really in better shape as an application developer.

  33. That is typical. But whoever is managing the DNS server should at least have an A record in the zone file that resolves the names pointed to by the NS records.

  34. Enoch Root, brother of Dan Collins, and his company may be able to help.
    I turned on Maggie of Maggie’s Notebook and The Lonely Conservative to his company and I believe they’re happy.

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