DNS weirdness.

August 2, 2006 10:05 AM

Metafilter's DNS is broken. (More inside.)
posted by mendel to Bugs at 10:05 AM (18 comments total)

I took a look after reading this Ask Mefi question and there is indeed some weirdness in mefi's DNS:

$ dig @ns1.nameresolve.com. www.metafilter.comwww.metafilter.com.  2400    IN      CNAME   70.86.84.162. 

and the same for anything else that is not "metafilter.com" itself, from which I assume there is a wildcard record for "*.metafilter.com" that is broken.

CNAMEs have to point to hostnames, not to addresses, so that record needs to be one of these instead:

*.metafilter.com.    IN  CNAME   metafilter.com.*.metafilter.com.    IN  A       70.86.84.162

for things to work correctly.
posted by mendel at 10:06 AM on August 2, 2006

Should be fixed now on the backup servers (I changed it to an A record) and in a few hours it should be resolved on DNS requests.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:10 AM on August 2, 2006

I can't get to anywhere but metatalk. :(
posted by frecklefaerie at 12:31 PM on August 2, 2006

Same here. All Day Long!
posted by Rash at 12:59 PM on August 2, 2006

same here
posted by StrasbourgSecaucus at 1:15 PM on August 2, 2006

I've fixed everything I can on my end, but unfortunately it takes hours for these things to propagate to other servers.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:45 PM on August 2, 2006

Liar! Give me back my shoes!

sorry.. always wanted to use that line..
posted by cavalier at 1:48 PM on August 2, 2006

Finally, AskMe is back. Hooray!
posted by Rash at 1:49 PM on August 2, 2006

yay, it all seems to be working now. Five minutes after I posted in AskMe that went screwy for me as well. Now, all seems fine.
posted by caddis at 1:49 PM on August 2, 2006

jinx
posted by caddis at 1:49 PM on August 2, 2006

Haha, I could get to the Blue but not any other *.metafilter.com. Weird, huh?
posted by muddgirl at 1:50 PM on August 2, 2006

It should only take about fifteen minutes for it to propagate to most people nowadays.
posted by cellphone at 2:00 PM on August 2, 2006

all of my dns servers see it fine now.
posted by StrasbourgSecaucus at 2:17 PM on August 2, 2006

This issue prevented me from providing a timely and piercing zing in another thread. I am disgusted.
posted by cortex at 3:42 PM on August 2, 2006

cellphone, the issue is caching: if your ISP resolver server has it cached, you may not see the change for 2 hours...
posted by baylink at 8:02 PM on August 2, 2006

baylink, not if you use short TTLs. I typically go with 15 minutes (not an issue as it used to be).
posted by zerokey at 10:18 PM on August 2, 2006

Well, it took four hours from the time Matt fixed the problem until the DNS would resolve for me. That is still an issue as far as I am concerned.
posted by caddis at 11:30 PM on August 2, 2006

Zerokey: note that some to many customer-resolver servers operated by ISP's *override* short TTLs these days, so even if you're good at what you do, it doesn't always help anymore.
posted by baylink at 7:45 PM on August 6, 2006