Re: octave.org DNS problems (was: Another OOP issue)

[John W. Eaton]

On 26-Sep-2008, dbateman wrote:

| John W. Eaton wrote:
| > 
| > | PS: Sending through gmail to address@hidden consistently has DNS 
failures. 
| > | Can we dump the arsehole who poisoned the octave DNS record.
| > 
| > Yeah, does anyone know if this is likely to go away after some period
| > of time, or are we screwed until we find out which nameservers have
| > the bad info? 
| > 
| 
| The problem is that the poisoning could happen any on the upstream DNS
| servers from where the request happens. finding which one needs patching is
| a major pain. However, the problem with octave.org seems to be pretty
| widespread so the first once to check that it is correctly patch is the one
| serving octave.org. The caches of the downstream servers will eventually be
| flushed and fix the issues.
| 
| I'm just surprised that I haven't heard of a lot of other sites suffering
| these type of problems recently.

I sent most of the following to you earlier, but I think it should be
posted on the list as well.

I still think the problem is that the ns0{3,4}.sbusiness.net
nameservers are listed is the problem.  I don't think these are coming
from a bad cache.  As far as I know, they really are listed as
nameservers for the domain when they should not be there now.  Back
whent eh domain was first registered in 2000, we initially had
ns0{1,2,3,4}.sbusiness.net listed as the nameservers for octave.org
because those were the default nameservers available with whoever was
the registrar for the domain (Network Solutions?).  Later, we replaced
ns0{1,2}.sbusiness.net with two wisc.edu nameservers, but apparently
the ns0{3,4}.sbusiness.net servers were never removed.  At some point
the sbusiness.net nameservers disappeared, and now it looks like some
squatter has picked them up and has them returning bogus information.
At least I think that's what is happening.  If we could find out for
sure whether the ns0{2,3}sbusiness.net nameservers really are listed
as secondary nameservers for the domain, that would help.  If they
are listed, they should be removed.  Otherwise, I think we will
continue to have problems.  If they are not listed as secondary
nameservers for the domain in the registrar records, then I think we
have a cache problem.

The reason it is taking a while to determine whether the sbusiness.net
nameservers are still actually listed in the domain registrar records
is that I don't own the domain.  The registration was contributed, and
the person who set it up is the technical and administrative contact
for the domain and he is busy and has been slow to respond.  We are
also trying to fix that problem by transferring the registration, but
unfortunately this may take some time.

jwe