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At 5:48 PM -0500 11/27/00, Robert J. Woodhead (AnimEigo) wrote:
Re: If a site is really acting as a secondary, what should I see?
From: Men & Mice Support
Date: Monday, November 27, 2000
Time: 3:53:50 pm
>My new ISP is supposed to be providing secondary DNS, but even with
>extensive logging on, I don't notice them doing zone transfers and
>when I DIG with -norecurse I get either just a SOA record (on one of
>their servers) or a referral to the .com roots (on the other one).
>
>So am I justified in toasting them for screwing up? I would assume
>that a -norecurse dig on the alleged secondaries ought to show the
>same thing as one on the main dns server, correct?
>
>One complication is that right now the TTL on the domains is 1 hour.
TTL doesn't affect the way a secondary server behaves. However, I
notice you've set your SOA record to the following:
animeigo.com. 3600 SOA dns.animeigo.com.
trebor.animeigo.com.
96100494 ; serial
3600 ; refresh (1 hour)
3600 ; retry (1 hour)
3600 ; expire (1 hour)
3600 ; minimum (1 hour)
The SOA record is the Domain Information dialog in QuickDNS Pro 2.x.
You should review the meanings of these fields before making changes
like this; the expire value, in particular, is going to cause
problems.
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Refresh: Frequency at which the secondary servers should check for updates.
Retry: If a refresh fails (primary server doesn't respond), frequency
at which secondary servers should retry until they get a successful
check. Generally recommended to be shorter than Refresh, but doesn't
have to be.
Expire: Maximum length of time between successful checks. If a
secondary can't contact the primary before this runs out, it stops
serving the domain. Must be longer than Refresh, to avoid problems;
generally recommended to be at least 1 week, up to 1 month or more.
Minimum: Default TTL. Any record (including the SOA record itself)
which has no explicit TTL will get this value instead.
TTL: Cache duration. A well-behaved server will never cache a record
for longer than this value. It is free to discard a record from cache
before the time limit, though. Unfortunately, there are resolvers
that ignore this value (and some are high-profile).
Note that all these values are in seconds. Also note that a secondary
server won't use new values (if you change them) until it next
updates its copy of the domain, at a time interval dependent on the
old Refresh and Retry values.
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What you should see in the dig results is that the response is marked
as authoritative. As I recall, that's the flag "aa" in the response
header - if you see it, the response is authoritative. I don't
recall, though. Also, make sure you're querying these servers for the
right record type - probably, ANY will work best. As I recall, the
default for dig is A.
I use DNS Expert's query tool, which permits you to turn recursive
querying on and off with a checkbox, and tells you in English whether
the response was authoritative.
I found that the following servers respond authoritatively for animeigo.com:
dns.animeigo.com
dns1.wilmington.net
dns2.wilmington.net
If these are your new ISP's servers, then everything looks fine from here.
____________________________________________________________________
Chris Buxton Men & Mice
cbuxton@menandmice.com We Make DNS Easy!
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