DNS is a fundamental part of the internet’s fabric. Break it and thing’s start going wrong.
If your zones do not comply to the RFCs then all sorts of strange things can happen.
We host quite a few domains, so our nameserver information is public (obviously). Unfortunately some people seem to think that by pointing a domain at our nameservers it will “magically” get into our DNS! I was informed yesterday that there were at least 20 domains pointing at our nameservers that did not have an SOA.
Presumably none of them were hoping to get anywhere
Another common mistake is when people think they’ve pointed the dns at us, but have used the incorrect information. eg. we have ns.domain.tld and ns2.domain.tld while they seem to think that we have ns1.domain.tld and ns2.domain.tld or some other variant.
Other common issues are related to Windows in offices. Typically the IT service company installs Office 200* small business or similar with Exchange. They should set it up for local email without interfering with their public domain. Our DNS logs tell a totally different story.
This can lead to interesting issues
Of course the bigger problems are when things (like email) go missing. Typical scenario is that the domain was registered by company X, who happens to be an ISP providing access (dialup, dsl etc). The domain is then moved to another company, but the losing ISP does not remove the DNS entries. As most of their clients use the ISPs DNS mail etc., will bounce or simply vanish.
In the case of non-Irish hosting companies DNS can be hilarious. The number of times we’ve seen errors from IE domains because the DNS was not setup correctly isn’t even vaguely amusing.
If you aren’t sure about how to manage DNS don’t try. Please! You hurt the rest of us!!
Useful links:
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