DNS ''problem''

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Date:

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Anyone who's a Mac and DNS expert, please feel free to chime in, and kick
some ideas around about this problem, I'm at wit's end.

Why would pager.beeperpeople not exist for my primary server
(ns1.n-connect.net - 208.245.212.3) yet be a fully qualified domain name,
and exist everywhere else.
Last night, my mail server started bouncing e-mail to that address,
claiming that the domain name didn't exist. Sure enough, probing the dns
server with dns expert said the same thing. However, I probe by secondary,
(208.245.212.2) and it's there (and it was newly looked up, I could tell by
the TTL). marge.jemm.com (208.245.212.24) also said it exists.

ns1.n-connect.net has been saying that this domain hasn't existed for the
past 14 hours.

I can only assume that ns1.n-connect.net (208.245.212.3) has corrupted data.

So, my question is twofold. (Oops, now fourfold)

1)Why did this happen
2)How long does QDNS cache nonexistent domains.
3)Why did my DNS server crash about the time I typed this? (The App, QDNS
has quit, Error Type 2)
4)Why does my Primary DNS server crash every 20 or 30 days?

I now realize that my last hair brained idea to filter out anything on the
web star listener port didn't work. I was starting to wonder if someone
was launching a DoS attach on that port (TCP or UDP). I'm starting to
think now, that it's internal hash table was corrupted, just before the
crash. First it gets flaky, then, it rolls over and dies. Could this be a
memory problem with the iMac? (Bad RAM could corrupt a hash table, right?
It could be as simple as bad RAM, right?)

Just before the crash, it was down to just above 5 MB of free mem, and it
had taken 3.8 million requests. I'm going to move it to another machine,
and wait another 30 days for it to crash. (Maybe 3.0 will be out by then?)
Rebooting regularly doesn't cut it either. I had to power cycle three
times, before the server would survive longer than 3 minutes. It tends to
die within about 10 seconds of server startup.
Rebooting a normally functioning server can also have this same affect, but
not nearly as often. (yeah, I know, it's strange) This situation is
starting to show the signs of flaky hardware.

I'm trying different hardware now.

-Jerry

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