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                                Breaking names

I hate it when things just stop working for no apparent reason.

DNS (Domain Name Services) stopped working here in the Facility in the Middle
of Nowhere. It was working fine yesturday but not today and as far as I could
tell, nothing on our end changed.

At first, I thought it might be another attack on the root DNS servers
(Internet Backbone DDoS "Largest Ever") [1] but in checking outside sources
proved that wasn't the case.

Then I thought maybe our Internet provider was filtering out DNS traffic or
something silly like that but Spring's [2] Linux box, which was running a DNS
server, could resolve fine.

I didn't have a clue, and Rob [3] didn't either—and both of us weren't really
in a condition to think things through (he's fighting a cold; I had just
gotten up).

Eventually, I was able to get it working. First, I had to remove

query-source address * port 53;

from /etc/named.conf and making that change required me to relax the firewall
rules to allow all UDP (UserDatagram Protocal) in, since the name server will
pick a random port to send the queries out on. I could probably specify an
unreserved port for the name server to send queries and then strengthen the
firewall back up.

Sigh.

It's still very annoying though.

[1] http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/22/2332233
[2] http://www.springdew.com/
[3] http://www.tragic-smurfs.com/

Email author at [email protected]

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