[nzlug] XTRA: DNS challenged :-)

[Simon Lyall]

On Mon, 8 Jan 2007, Dylan Reeve wrote:
> I can't be sure but I think I may have set that up. I was one of the DNS
> admins at ihug in 97/98 (along with Simon Green, who posts here
> sometimes). We used to play with DNS for things like that often. I can't
> remember any others, but we had various CNAMEs for a bunch of things -
> common misspellings (I think stmp.ihug.co.nz and sntp.ihug.co.nz should
> resolve - having both worked on the helpdesk we knew about that problem).

I think I got rid of the misspellings. They are a bad idea since it means
an unknown percentage of customers will have the wrong settings. The best
idea is to have a page of settings and *only* support those. Helpdesk used
to tell customers all sorts of stupid things like "put smtp1.ihug.co.nz as
your mail server" etc. So when smtp1 dies or gets shutdown all those
customers broke.

> Xtra is by far the most useless ISP I have ever dealt with for DNS. I've
> had to wait up to a week for them to action DNS changes for client
> (don't most ISPs give you web panels for that now?) and a domain name we
> moved away from xtra in November was (until today) still being answered
> authoritatively by Xtra's nameserver - A problem we had nearly 10 years
> ago when I was doing domains at Ihug.

Were you still being billed? :-)

Splitting authoritative and caching servers is a good idea. That way it
doesn't really even matter if your authoritative servers have domains they
shouldn't really because they don't sow up in the delegation path so
nobody will notice.

It doesn't help that most people don't really know how to move a domain
from one provider to the next but that reminds me.

-- 
Simon J. Lyall  |  Very Busy  |  Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/
"To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.