On 15-Jul-05 Jason Clifford wrote:

On Fri, 15 Jul 2005, MJ Ray via RT wrote:

...

Ted, I can see UKFSN, so I'll forward your message to support@ukfsn. I assume you can't, what with not being able to see their DNS entries. Hopefully they can reply to you/the list as appropriate.

...

It looks as though UKFSN had disappeared from the world:

dig -a smtp.ukfsn.org -> No Answer dig -a www.ukfsn.org -> No Answer dig -mx ukfsn.org -> No Answer traceroute www.ukfsn.org -> unknown host www.ukfsn.org

I suspect the problem was with Ted's upstream network provider as UKFSN is certainly still here and we've not had any downtime this morning.

The name servers haven't been changed at all and I would have noticed any network interruption as I've been doing lots of interactive work on the servers this morning.

Jason

Thanks, MJ & Jason! In fact, following a considerable amount of forensic poking around, I think I have identified a possible source of the problem as BT's DNS going flaky. Since their DNS server is one of the entries in my /etc/resolv.conf this may be the explanation. However, other entries are DNS servers at mcc.ac.uk, and one of these should have worked!

Nevertheless I substituted a different MCC DNS server (the on that responded to 'dig') as well.

At the same time, a lot of FQDN addresses worked fine while the smtp.ukfsn.org server was "unkown" (e.g. browsing the web for guardian.co.uk of bbc.so.uk) while others did not!

As of rather more than an hour ago, no further problems.

A bit of a mystery still, therefore, and I apologise for not coming back to the list earlier to say it was resolved, to save people the trouble they have gone to. In mitigation I can only plead being busy dealing with a backlog of mail which had been halted while the problem was ongoing.

Thanks again, and best wishes, Ted.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 15-Jul-05 Time: 13:45:29 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------