Those low-down DNS blues

This week's InfoWorld column ("Digging into DNS") discusses the importance of your and others' DNS infrastructure to the proper functioning of business. I might have been tempted to file this into the "well, duh" category and never even write about it, but it seems that DNS issues pop up almost daily in the course of business. I had one scary run-in with DNS problems six years ago, and I'll never forget it:

My first encounter with serious DNS problems occurred years ago when I took over the operations of a troubled IT department. DNS administration in the group was haphazard at best, and because DNS was being administered via an over-simplified GUI on Windows NT, the administrators didn’t have to understand how DNS really worked.

Then one day, e-mail stopped coming in. And then the phones started ringing when our Web site became unavailable. After a long and grueling process, we discovered that a bug in our GUI-based DNS software had resulted in a truncated zone file -- the back-end text configuration file where the DNS rubber meets the name-resolution road -- and our domain was gradually (but surely) falling off the Internet itself, taking all our Internet services with it. We dumped the buggy GUI for open source BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain). I handed over DNS duties to a talented Linux sysadmin who manually edited the zone file, and we never had those problems again.

I guess I hit on something. Within hours of my column posting to InfoWorld.com, I got a frantic e-mail from a network engineer in India who seemed to have the same problem I had on that fateful day six years ago (the name has been changed to protect the innocent):

Dear Mr. Chad Dickerson,

I am (name withheld) currently working with (company name withheld), India. I read your article which is publishing in the follwing [sic] URL

http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/08/13/33OPconnection_1.html

I am totally stunned, after I go through your article. Now we are facing the same problem which you mention in that article. Can you plz guide me how to solve the DNS issue.

Offcourse [sic] I know,  you are in one big position in your concern. You cannot spend time with this.  

Thanks in Advance

Regards
(name withheld again)

Wish I could help, but based on my experience, I would do what I did when I had my problem several years ago:

• Go over to O'Reilly's Safari service and get DNS and BIND and the DNS & BIND Cookbook.
  
• If you're using a GUI to manage DNS, find the zone file on your system and look at it. There are some sample zone files here
  
• If that doesn't lead to success, grab the lowest-end spare workstation you have around and build a Linux (or FreeBSD) box and install BIND (DNS is not very resource-intensive, so a low-end box will do). If the step above *does* lead to success, do the above step anyway and dump your buggy DNS implementation.
  

Hope that helps.