After weeks off endless fighting with my DNS setup and having an
intermittent site outages, I finally decided to look a bit deeper into
the problem.
Of course it was pretty much discarding all other options that finally
led to the truth.
If I had been using Linux on my desktop to manage the servers this would
have been solved within a day, or worse yet: there never would have been
a problem at all. Why?
Because Windows sets itself up so damn easily and with no thought what
so ever, that I never bothered to see what my desktop was using for DNS.
It was using the router.
Only.
DUH!
I was in the middle of validating a site at w3 (standards based
programming is the only way to go) when it went down and I decided to
run it through the validator and was surprised it could run the site,
when I could not.
So I checked my client DNS. When I noticed the DNS being only the
router, I reset it to my own DNS server, and praise be to the blessed
Virgin, everything started working properly.
Woah, is the net fast now.
So all (or almost all) of the problems I have been having were because
the router's DNS responder became confused buy the internal DNS,
external DNS, netzero, and itself (or maybe its its just naturally
confused, I dunno). When the router got confused, so did my windows
boxes (but not the rest of the net, but its hard getting remote people
to be online whne yu need them to be for testing, and propagation can
take a couple hours).
I went in and I set the two Linux boxes resolve.confs and hard set the
all clients (4) to my internal DNS as primary - nothing talks to the
router for anything but IP and gateway assignment. Hard setting the DNS
to my own server, which forwards to two different DNS servers if mine
has no answer, than those used by the router, has so far been without a
burp. I even have virtual sub-domains working with my virtual hosts and
all is happy.
If I had made the connection that my sites stopped working but not the
Internet, sooner, this never would have occurred.
The again, if this never occurred I would not have learned anything new
(which I learned tons of) - you should see how darn pretty my zone
files are now - I use such scary things as @origin. :)
Anybody want to buy a slightly used 5 Port Switch/Wireless DSL Router? ;)