[Scottish] Strange DNS problem

[Michael Cameron]

>OK - here's a weird one for you.
>
>Last month I had a funny DNS outage - could connect to my ISP (freenetname
>at that point) but couldn't collect mail, or ping/surf any web addresses,
>or use IRC. I fiddled for a day, then went to bed. In the morning
>everything was ok.
>
>This month, on the _same_date_ (27th - binary implications?) the same thing
>happened. Using a different ISP (ntlworld) although still with the DNS from
>freenetname as one of the 3 addresses in /etc/resolv.conf. This month I
>have been running Firestarter firewall, but last month I didn't even know
>about it. Other than that, everything is the same. And the problem resolved
>itself after a day again.
>
>Any ideas what might be happening? (I'm baffled)
>
You say DNS outage but I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion.  Were
you able to resolve names to IP addresses and then unable to reach those
addresses?  If so this would not be a DNS failure but sounds more like a
routing problem.  Or were you unable to resolve names but could reach any
(previously known) IP addresses?  This would be a DNS outage and if you use
names for mail/ping/web then would obviously mean you could not reach those
services (but only because you didn't know the address.  How this would
occur if you had 3 DNS servers configured is strange, if one was not
responding then the others whould be used.  Why the 27th of each month?  Why
not?  Maybe they update user accounts on a monthly basis and it is not a
transparent process, who knows.


MC