DNS problems

Dominic Mitchell dom at happygiraffe.net
Wed Apr 3 18:54:54 BST 2002


On Wed, Apr 03, 2002 at 05:21:40PM +0100, Tim Wiser wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> LDAP problem currently solved and a few more ideas under the bonnet.... I
> now find that I am faced with another problem!  99% of the time mail is
> working - users can use the server as an outgoing mail relay.  It is using
> the BT OpenWorld server as a smart host so it doesn't have to deliver the
> mail directly.  However, I noticed that mails to a particular domain,
> bookpoint.co.uk, are failing.  Neither my local DNS proxy or the BT
> OpenWorld DNS servers know about the bookpoint.co.uk domain.  No other DNS
> servers that I know of know about this domain either.  Putting
> http://www.bookpoint.co.uk into Internet Explorer on my Windows box takes me
> to http://www.hodder.co.uk or similar.

Hmmm, that appears to be reasonable.  The website is a CNAME (an alias)
for hoddersystems.com:

    % host www.bookpoint.co.uk
    www.bookpoint.co.uk is a nickname for live-redirect.hoddersystems.com
    live-redirect.hoddersystems.com is a nickname for srv-cluster.hoddersystems.com
    srv-cluster.hoddersystems.com has address 217.33.75.37
    srv-cluster.hoddersystems.com has address 217.33.75.36

That's fairly normal behaviour.  Presumably the lack of a bookpoint
website just means that they have forgotten to set up the website
correctly at their end.  Actually, looking at the site, it's just doing
a redirectl the actual bookpoint info is at:

    http://www.hodderheadline.co.uk/index.asp?area=bp

You could always try to delve the information out of google's cache; it
can be quite handy for things-that-used-to-work-that-are-now-broken.

Regarding the mail, that seems reasonable at first glance:

    % host -t mx bookpoint.co.uk
    bookpoint.co.uk mail is handled (pri=2) by mail.hodder.co.uk
    bookpoint.co.uk mail is handled (pri=1) by mail.bookpoint.co.uk

I've just sent a test message and it seems to be going ok from here;
you'll have to let us know the error message to know what's going on.

It's worth finding out what the answer should be from the authoritative
servers.  These ones should know what's going on

    % host -t ns bookpoint.co.uk
    bookpoint.co.uk name server ns2.hoddersystems.com
    bookpoint.co.uk name server ns3.hoddersystems.com
    bookpoint.co.uk name server ns1.hoddersystems.com
    % host -t mx bookpoint.co.uk ns1.hoddersystems.com
    Using domain server:
    Name: ns1.hoddersystems.com
    Address: 217.33.75.34
    Aliases:

    bookpoint.co.uk mail is handled (pri=1) by mail.bookpoint.co.uk
    bookpoint.co.uk mail is handled (pri=2) by mail.hodder.co.uk
    % host -t mx bookpoint.co.uk ns2.hoddersystems.com
    Using domain server:
    Name: ns2.hoddersystems.com
    Address: 217.33.75.61
    Aliases:

    bookpoint.co.uk mail is handled (pri=1) by mail.bookpoint.co.uk
    bookpoint.co.uk mail is handled (pri=2) by mail.hodder.co.uk
    % host -t mx bookpoint.co.uk ns3.hoddersystems.com
    Using domain server:
    Name: ns3.hoddersystems.com
    Address: 195.50.86.232
    Aliases:

    bookpoint.co.uk mail is handled (pri=1) by mail.bookpoint.co.uk
    bookpoint.co.uk mail is handled (pri=2) by mail.hodder.co.uk

As all three servers are responding identically, this is a pretty good
indication that things are ok at their end.

-Dom




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