Sonic DNS not resolving selected servers

[DNS_problems]

Hi,

I have been unable to consistently access a website using Sonic's DNS servers for the last two months. I am able to access it for a few minutes, and then the server becomes unreachable. After a month of trying every day, I was able to eventually message the support staff for the website in question and they indicated that my DNS server appeared to be the problem. Apparently some DNS servers don't support this domain particularly well. I called support earlier today and was told that tech support couldn't handle this problem, which was disappointing. I changed my DNS (per tech support suggestion) to using Google's DNS server, and the problem immediately resolved.

This strongly suggests that the problem lies within the Sonic.net DNS servers and I'd love to have someone take a look, open a ticket, and look into the problem. I've spent hours over the last two months trying to puzzle this out and I'm extremely frustrated. I spent roughly 40 minutes on the phone today alone trying to get this nailed down and to alert someone at Sonic. I was told that this is a network operations problem, and that I needed to post in these forums.

I am generally a very happy Sonic customer and recommend your service to nearly everyone, but this is a pretty rotten customer service experience. I already spent hours on this problem, and nobody on the phone can open a ticket? Very annoying.

Anyway, I hope someone will take a look at this and contact me about the issue.

[dane]

Sorry for the issues!

What is the domain that you are having trouble resolving?

[DNS_problems]

Hi Dane,

Thanks for the quick response!

I'd be happy to discuss that privately, I am not willing to divulge the domain publicly for security reasons. What is the best way to continue the discussion in an appropriate manner?

Thanks!

[dane]

Hi Dane,

Thanks for the quick response!

I'd be happy to discuss that privately, I am not willing to divulge the domain publicly for security reasons. What is the best way to continue the discussion in an appropriate manner?

Thanks!

I was able to find the domain via our support notes. The only issue I see is that their SOA is shorter than recommended, and it's possible that their resolver was down longer than the SOA, but that Google DNS disregarded the short value and continued to serve the potentially stale DNS info.

While it was down, it'd have been interesting to see if their primary nameserver was responsive. I'm guessing not, but can't of course demonstrate that after the fact.

[DNS_problems]

Hi Dane,

Thanks again for the awesome and quick responses.

Wouldn't this just manifest as a short outage of their domain during a transition? It was pretty unusable for the last two months via HTTP and other protocols.

I appreciate your effort, just want to make sure there is a way to resolve this. I want to go back to using your DNS for privacy reasons.

Thanks!

[dane]

Hi Dane,

Thanks again for the awesome and quick responses.

Wouldn't this just manifest as a short outage of their domain during a transition? It was pretty unusable for the last two months via HTTP and other protocols.

I appreciate your effort, just want to make sure there is a way to resolve this. I want to go back to using your DNS for privacy reasons.

Thanks!

Their start of authority expiration was set to seven days, whereas the RFC recommends this be set to around 42 days. What this means is that a secondary server that cannot reach their primary for more than a week must expire the record. My _guess_ is that their primary DNS was down for more than a week, and that Google's DNS might just continue to serve it (efficiency, right?!), whereas we do not.

But, that's just a guess - because it's up now, we can't really see what was wrong. But point is, differences between how Google DNS and Sonic DNS respond can be related to issues on the far side, not with our servers.

If you experience DNS issues in the future, you could try one of the various DNS test tools on the web, which can check realtime response as well as give an analysis of any errors that could be affecting DNS service.

[DNS_problems]

Thanks for the explanation, I will follow up with the site owners to see if we can get any additional information.