[Imc-aotearoa-tech] DNS and other issues at CAT

[Andrew McNaughton]

Hmm.  I wasn't on the imc-aotearoa-tech list, but I am now.

A bit of info on what's going on at cat.  I'm not sure what's been
discussed here already, so apologies for any duplication.

CAT has recently changed ADSL provider for the warehouse at Turella.
There's a number of issues that have come up as a result, which are being
worked through.  Some of those affect indymedia.org.nz and some don't.

AIM uses CAT for web, dns and mail services.

Our web server (conway.cat.org.au) is not currently on the ADSL network,
but is going to be moved at some point in the future.  I'm a bit hazy on
the details.  I expect there will be a short outage when this moves, but
it shouldn't be a big deal.

Our primary Mail server is also conway.cat.org.au.  Neither it nor our
secondary mail server (octo.hl.com.au) are on the ADSL network.  When
conway gets moved, incoming mail will go to octo.hl.com.au and sit there
till conway comes back on line, at which point it will all get sent
through to conway, and everything will continue as usual.  If anyone is
collecting mail from conway directly, that will be offline temporarily.

The problems we've been seeing are mostly due to DNS.  All of CAT's dns is
managed from diesel.cat.org.au, which is on the turella ADSL network.
There's been problems with domain information being transferred from
diesel to other domain servers due to failure of the reverse dns records
for 203.57.122.* addresses, including diesel.  In particular
spinach.va.com.au wasn't getting the info, which is one of AIM's DNS
servers.  If your ISP's domain server chose spinach as the server to ask
about the indymedia.org.nz domain, you wouldn't be able to get through to
the site.  one in three servers would fail.

In order to avoid the problem, I've taken spinach.va.com.au of the list of
DNS servers for the indymedia.org.nz domain.  For the time being I'm using
free DNS servers at ZoneEdit.com instead.

Andrew







On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, Danyl Strype wrote:

>
> Kia ora Andrew,
>
> Thanks for stepping up to help with this DNS stuff. Your expertise in
> the matter is really appreciated.
>
> Are you on the <imc-aotearoa-tech at indymedia.org> list? Could you please
> post a more detailed explanation of exactly what's going on with CAT's
> DNS and how it affects AIM to the tech list and maybe a brief
> layperson's summary to imc-aotearoa? Just a suggestion. I did notice in
> our initial discussions about forming Aotearoa Indymedia a lot of people
> felt flooded by too much techy details appearing on the main list.
>
> Again, keep up the good work and say kia ora to Andy and Safari for me.
>
> RnB,
> Strypey
>
>

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Andrew McNaughton           In Sydney
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andrew at scoop.co.nz
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