Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with dns

Show me your naming convention

togdon — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:28:46 -0800

After approximately 10 years of using the same equipment naming convention at work we're thinking about changing, I'm curious what other people have used. Our current convention was decided with much frustration by committee about 10 years ago. Roughly we use this for the FQDN:

[network interface].[device class].[pop].[organization].[domain]

A better example might be:

hme0.sun457.pdx1.acme.domain.tld

This gets used as the reverse pointer for the primary IP on the box, and as a business rule we've never re-used names (so once sun457 is assigned to a piece of equipment it never gets another name and any replacement will have a new name). In addition to that name we create a minimum of two others (as CNAMEs to the A record), a nodename that's essentially the shortened version of the FQDN (eg. sun457.domain.tld) and a friendly name that better describes the function of the piece of equipment (eg. staff.domain.tld).

At the time the convention was put in place we had three geographically separated data centers, no good systems for tracking inventory, and a needed to provide as much information as possible via the reverse pointer on the IP alone.

Fast forward a few months from when the convention was put in place and we'd managed to get a database with a nice web front end in place to track all of the pieces that were part of the name along with a whole lot more. Fast forward a few more years and we managed to get a good tracking system in place for inventory. Fast forward to today and we've got in the neighborhood of 1000 pieces of equipment (servers, routers, switches, load balancers, virtual machines, desktops, etc). We're working to consolidate our various ad-hoc tools into a unified portal, and we're shifting to a new monitoring system for the third time since the convention was put in place.

I'm one of the only folks that remembers the initial arguments over the naming convention, most new people think it's bloated and gives away too much information in the hostname. I tend to agree. The current system works fine for our purposes, and probably always will, it just seems like we could do better and that now is the best time to make a change.

Simply cutting the name down to the nodename (eg. sun457.domain.tld) seems like the easiest thing, but there are a variety of arguments about keeping other pieces. On top of that, after 10 years it seems like if we're going to make a change we might as well either make a drastic one or no change at all.

So, with the caveat that these are going in DNS (so they need to conform to the RFCs) and that cutesy names are out (there aren't enough Simpsons characters to cover the number of devices we have and remembering that itchy and scratchy are DNS servers and that moe, lenny, and carl are border routers simply isn't an option), what have you used?

The sky is the limit, so outside of the DNS/cutesy limits don't try to fit with any of the above.

DHCP giving clients addresses with prior DNS record

jmd82 — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:47:26 -0800

DHCP giving out IP address leases with pre-existing DNS entries for the wrong machine causing network chaos on a mixed windows & mac environment, and it's the macs who are having the problems. We have DHCP & DNS on a Windows 2003 server. Apple laptops (leopard) are bound to AD. The clients get a DHCP lease easily enough, but then at some point in the future (usually a few weeks, maybe less), they cannot log in or won't get settings from the server.

Have Apple support, and their response is the machine account is not authenticating with AD, so no log in. OK, so...

Upon investigation into DNS, it turns out that these client's DNS entry is actually tied to another PC's IP address. For instance, maclaptop.mydomain.com gets 192.168.1.1. However, the DNS record for 192.168.1.1 on the network is actually pc.mydomain.com. This is causing maclaptop.mydomain.com to try authenticating as pc.mydomain.com, which they are not and getting rejected. I am led to believe this from Console messages stating pc@mydomain.com cannot authenticate with kerberos.

Any thoughts or ideas on how to prevent this from happening? I can delete those individual DNS records and the clients can log in then properly, but at some point in the future, it'll loose its lease and get the address with a wrong DNS entry at some point.

Can anyone recommend a South African registrar that provides DNS management for .co.za domains?

Hartster — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:28:39 -0800

Can anyone recommend a South African registrar that provides DNS management for .co.za domains? We're* taking over a South African domain and we need it to be transferred over to us. It looks like you can't transfer .co.za domains to 'international' dns providers like DynDNS or GoDaddy (i.e. those two have explicitly said it's impossible so I'm assuming this is true for others).

All we want to do is transfer the domain to us, take control of the DNS and point it to our existing server (so we don't need hosting etc).

Reliable is essential, easy to use is good, and free/cheap is a bonus.

*Where "we" are a non-SA company

Why internet slow

Citizen Premier — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:56:24 -0800

Frequently, web pages time out and won't load--why is this happening? Now, I have a 512 kbps connection, which isn't that fast, but I'm pretty sure it shouldn't be that slow. I just got this internet service, and I've been able to download torrents fairly quickly. No, that's not the problem--I turn my torrent software off and it's still quite slow.

It's not my firewall. I also already tried opening more ports on firefox.

Oh yes, and I'm on a PC with Windows XP. And I'm not terribly knowledgeable. Any help will help.

How should I point my two nearly-identical domains?

jaffacakerhubarb — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:23:39 -0800

Do I keep two domains separate but identical, or do I pick one and point the other to it? I'm using Wordpress to host a site I've just started — no content quite yet, but that comes next. I have two identical domains, like so*:

acmewidgets.net
acmewidgets.org

At the moment, you can go to both of these domains individually and they point to exactly the same content. Is this a Good Thing, or should I pick one of these domains - say, the .org - and have the .net redirect to it? Or should I leave it as it is at the moment? For consistency, it would probably be better to pick one, but I'm wondering if there's any benefit to retaining the existing setup.

Apologies if this question seems ridiculously simple to answer. The domains, in case you figured it out, aren't actually acmewidgets.whatever — I'd link to them, but they're far from ready for primetime. Getting them ready is almost certain to be my next AskMe question!

Help me help my browser to go back to completing missing URL endings even though my ISP is jerky

Your Time Machine Sucks — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 07:39:57 -0800

My ISP's new "feature" of rerouting incomplete URLs to their own custom (awful) search page is hijacking my normal browser behavior of completing URLs with .com. Anything I can do to reassert normalcy? My ISP is T-Online, which like a few other ISPs has started to hijack malformed URLs and send me to an awful "did you mean...?" page, which coincidentally happens to contain advertisements.

Until this started happening a week ago, if I typed "something" into my Safari 3.2.1 (OS X 10.5.x) location field, Safari would complete the URL as "something.com" and go there, but no longer (at least, I was under the impression that this was a Safari thing and not a DNS thing, since Internet Explorer always manifested the re-route-to-a-search-page behavior).

T-Online claims that it is possible to opt out from their new "Navigationshilfe" ("Navigation Help") program, but when I followed their instructions to opt out, nothing changed. Is there a technical solution for this? My router runs dd-wrt so if there is anything I can do there or on my local machine with DNS or hosts settings, that would be ideal.

T-Online's customer support is pretty dumb, so I will consider calling them if there is no workaround, but it is improbable that they will a) know what I'm talking about, b) know if it is possible to turn it off, c) take the correct steps to turn it off, d) not somehow find a way to increase the cost of my plan in the process, so that is definitely a last resort.

Thanks for any advice!

Moving Domain, Hosting, and Email from two companies to two others?

Alabaster — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 07:37:51 -0800

Please help me move my domain and hosting from two companies to two new companies without losing email service (and learn about DNS in the process)... details inside... BACKGROUND INFORMATION:

So I have a domain name registered through one company, with a website hosted by another company. For simplicity's sake, let's call them:

DOMAIN: myname.com
REGISTRAR: MyAwesomeRegistrar
HOSTING: HeyCoolHosting

My "@myname.com" email addresses are hosted through "HeyCoolHosting." They have a webmail interface (mail.myname.com), but I access them using IMAP (in Thunderbird and/or Gmail).

My site itself is a fairly simple HTML/CSS page that I maintain by FTP. I have a .htaccess set up if that complicates things. (I also have WordPress and Coppermine installed but I don't use them and have no need to retain their data).

WHAT I'D LIKE TO DO:

My costs are not enormous but I'm paying for a lot of bandwidth and storage I don't need.

I have been thinking about moving my site and domain name to nearlyfreespeech.net (that's the real name, not an alias), which makes more sense for the amount of bandwidth I use.

NFS doesn't really do email hosting and I don't want to lose/interrupt service my 3-4 @myname.com adresses. I thought I would try pointing my email addresses to "Google Apps For Your Domain" so I can use these addresses with a Gmail interface. (But I can no longer find information about GAfyD-- does it exist anymore?)

I am fairly computer savvy but I don't know much about the behind-the-scenes workings of web/email traffic -- I can easily upload my data/html/css to a new FTP, but I know very little about DNS and how to get my domain name and email addresses to point to the right places. I'm also not sure what order to do things in (set up the new accounts first, then transfer? Cancel the old accounts first, then set up the new ones? Some other combination?)

Can someone walk me through, step-by-step, the process I should go through in order to make this transition without losing data, service, my mind, etc? A little "tutorial" information would be helpful so I know what I'm doing, but don't go out of your way (and no need to oversimplify, it's mainly just the DNS stuff that eludes me).

Thank you

Changing domain servers: easy-peasy, or fraught with hidden danger?

Guy_Inamonkeysuit — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 06:34:47 -0800

My inamorata works for a company that is, surprise surprise, experiencing economic difficulties. One area where they are hurting is web hosting. Their site is costing them about $600 a month, which is waaay out of line for their site: html with some Flash, nothing special, not even any video. It changes rarely. What I want to do is to take over maintaining this site and save them a bunch of money. This is a small construction company with half a dozen or so networked employees. I want to set them up on LinkSky, where I do most of my client hosting.

Now, I'm a web designer, not an IT guy, and I am anxious not to screw this up. I've built a lot of sites in my time but I have never moved one before. Am I correct in my assumption that all I need to do is to FTP the extant files (and Outlook's email account info) to a new server and point the domain there? Am I missing any "gotcha's"?

One caveat is that they are currently getting email through the Microsoft Exchange, which they don't like because that too is costing money. So I want to re-configure Outlook (a new email account, obviously) for the new servers. Shouldn't be difficult, right?

However, I've looked at some earlier posts, such as the one below, and they do make me a bit uneasy. So: is this a dumb thing for me to attempt?

http://ask.metafilter.com/4626/Moving-Domain-Hosts

How do I make Firefox go to a page that I choose if I type a bad URL?

farmersckn — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:20:02 -0800

How do I make Firefox go to a page that I choose if I type a bad URL? This askmefi post has some potentially useful info but it does not apply in my case.

In Firefox 3.06, if I type a bad URL into my address bar, such as http://blah/ and instead of doing a google search or an error page, or showing me a url that I might have been attempting to reach, like blah.com, it takes me to this spam search page: "http://hwerror.hwpub.com/?ck=esb02oob60&et=1".

I have modified "keyword.url" in my about:config to do a google search on keywords (different than the default I'm feeling Lucky Search), but it has no effect when I type only a single word into my address bar and hit enter.

I have tried to disable "keyword.enabled" and that has no effect on this problem either.

I have run firefox in safe mode and it has the same result.

I have already switched my DNS server to OpenDNS and confirmed that it is working, so I do not believe that my ISP is re-routing my request.

It is interesting to me, that if I view source on the page, it shows a frameset, and only within that frameset does it pull in the url for the search page referenced above.

I believe that somewhere inside the code or configuration files, or possibly an extension, Firefox has been tweaked to do this to me. Is it possible for me to reconfigure it so that it does not happen?

I am already aware that I am causing this by typing a malformed URL, and that I can do keyword searches if I type two words into the address bar, and also that I can hit CTRL+ENTER to magically append ".com" to a single word in the address bar.

I just want to know if there is a way to put this intercept this redirect and put in my own to google or whatever I desire.

Thank you all.

Why is my USB headset/mic only buzzing when I use Dragon Naturally Speaking?

omnigut — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:43:56 -0800

buzzing noise in Dragon Naturally Speaking, but not on other programs. Using VMWare fusion to run DNS on my Mac, and recording/listening through a Dinex USB headset with microphone. Any suggestions? Hi. Here's the problem:
There is a changing amount of buzzing when I use DNS (version 10). Sometimes a lot, other times only a little. There is always some. I'm using it on my mac (OS X 10.5), running VMWare Fusion to run it on Windows, as necessary.

When I heard the buzzing noise, I thought it had something to do with the mic, but there doesn't seem to be a problem on Photobooth, so I'm guessing it isn't hardware problems.

So I thought it was the fact that the USB headset/mic was being shared by both the mac and VMWare. So I changed all the mac settings, trying different combinations (also changing VMWare's sound settings, and then the control panel's sound settings) all to no avail. Also, when I downloaded "Free Sound Recorder" to use with VMWare fusion, the noise was a lot less, almost inaudible. So I think it's actually DNS that's messing up.

Please help. I'm trying to overcome pain in my wrists, and all this trouble is just exacerbating the situation. Thanks!

How can I change the windows local domain DNS setting?

torpark — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 09:06:50 -0800

How can I change the windows local domain DNS setting? How do i modify the windows local domain (aka default domain)? I am not speaking of the windows/workgroup/logon domain, I am talking about the local DNS setting. I want to change how DNS is resolved, so that when the DNS resolver concatenates the request for google, I control what domain it concats with. So instead of "www.google.com.192.168.1.1" it would instead concat to "www.google.com.somedomain.com"

How do I disable DHCP from doing DNS updates in Windows?

torpark — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:26:26 -0800

My VPN in leaking DNS requests. I am clearing out DNS entries on non-VPN interfaces using netsh, but Windows keeps using DHCP to automatically refill the DNS information. Microsoft lists a way to do it in Windows 2k/2k3, but that registry location doesn't exist on any other Windows OS. I need to do this for XP and Vista also. How can I automatically disable DHCP from doing DNS updates using programming (not telling users to do control panel navigation)?

If only Google were in the registrar business...

qxntpqbbbqxl — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 13:37:16 -0800

Need recommendations for a registrar with a soul I'm looking for a new registrar for a few personal domains. After I've transferred the domains, I want to be left alone: No promotional offer spam, no up-selling of extra services, and no pimping my contact info to third parties. The only "extra" I want is the ability to withhold my personal information from the domain record. I don't need hosting.

Previous questions have focused on cheap registrars, but I don't mind paying a few extra bucks to a company that respects my privacy.

Any suggestions?

(I've used Network Solutions and GoDaddy in the past; they are the antitheses of what I'm looking for)

Why did AT&T lose our DNS records!?

kbanas — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 07:08:04 -0800

iPhones, AT&T, and the University of Michigan..?! Help me sort out what is a - best I can figure - DNS issue! I will attempt to be brief and only cover the salient details.

I work for the EECS Department at the University of Michigan doing IT support. I am the desktop support guy. In our department we also run our own web and e-mail services (and servers). I don't have much to do with this - these are all rack mounted Linux machines and they're administered by a bunch of Unix people. I am, I guess, sort of a filter between these cantankerous admins and the general population. Admins change the mail configuration. It breaks Outlook. I figure out how and why it fixes Outlook. They claim people should just use Berkley Mail. I politely disagree. We eventually reach compromise.

Anyway. I have an iPhone, as do several faculty, staff and graduate students in the department. I use this phone with my EECS IMAP mail server. This has never been a problem for me.

Then, suddenly, last week I could no longer send or receive e-mail from my EECS mail account while on the AT&T network. It would work on the campus WiFi. It would work on my WiFi at home. It would work at random WiFi hotspots. But it refused to work while using 3G (or EDGE) data services.

My GMail account worked without issue.

Well, I figured this was just a transient issue and it would disappear.

No such luck.

Instead, starting yesterday my trouble ticket system started to fill up with complaints from other iPhone users that their EECS mail is also not functioning on the cellular network.

At this point, I started to do some digging.

It seems like the AT&T network has, like - and here I lose the technical language a little bit - lost our DNS entries.

I installed an SSH client on my iPhone and on the 3G network I can't connect to one of our machines - marquette.eecs.umich.edu - I get a "hostname not found" error. But, if I try it via IP, it works.

I tried to browse to our website, www.eecs.umich.edu, on Safari. On the 3G network, it can't open the page. If I try it via IP, it works.

I went into my mail client and changed my incoming and outgoing mail servers to IP values instead of hostnames, and, viola, on 3G it started to work.

What the hell?

Our admins don't have a clue. They say our MX records and our servers and our firewalls are all configured correctly. They look at the logs and, yes, as you would suspect (as the names can't be resolved), they don't even see my phone attempting a connection.

Data points I think would be helpful - is this a geographical issue? Can people in other parts of the country with iPhones browse to, say, www.eecs.umich.edu? Is this an iPhone specific issue? I've read some criticism of the iPhone's DNS resolver - does this affect other mobile devices on the AT&T network?

That settled, what the hell could be causing this? I have no idea who in AT&T I would possibly call - it sounds like the support call from hell. I have a hard enough time just trying to check how many minutes I've used.

Any ideas, hive mind?

DNS for just the office ?

southof40 — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:07:53 -0800

What is the best solution to provide 'local DNS' for an office which has outgrown a hosts file solution ? We have a domain, say foo.com. We use ZoneEdit to provide DNS for the domain (including numerous sub-domains).

Within the office to allow machines/applications to be named we have used hosts file but this is no longer practicable (unless there's some means of automating hosts distribution).

All machines in the office are using 192.168.10.x IP's and, I presume, this means that we couldn't put the sub-domains on ZoneEdit even if we wanted to.

I feel like we should be able to run a DNS server which the local machines can use as a 'DNS server of first-resort' and then if the name is not resolved the DNS request can go onto our standard DNS servers which will resolve everything that isn't resolved by the 'office DNS' server. Hence onlyforuseintheoffice.foo.com would be resolved to 192.168.10.1 but thewholeworldneedsthis.com would not be known to the local DNS server and would go out to the I'net to get resolved (by virtue of the ZoneEdit servers)

Finally the question(s) !

1. Can we 'split' responsibility for the domain in this way ?
2. There's 'Simple DNS Plus' and there's the stuff that's built into Window 2003 - any experiences of doing what I describe with either ?
3. Is there a simpler 'non-DNS server' way I've overlooked ?

What happened to the Internet in 11/07?

about_time — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 09:15:40 -0800

A question about Internet domains and DNS: What happened to the number of registered domains between 10/07 and 11/07? For the first time they dropped, and significantly: 2 million domains were unregistered. Zooknic shows this result.

Date Total domains
11/15/2007 94,854,717
10/15/2007 96,946,506
9/15/2007 95,233,625

This is the only month in history that there is negative growth since 1998. Was there a policy change? Something cleaned up? If you know of something, a specific reference to what you recall would be great to have. Thanks.

How do you spell D-N-S?

fijiwriter — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 07:54:32 -0800

How do you explain DNS, A records, MX records, etc. to your staff and clients? What's the best way to get non-technical people to understand this? In my line of work, we have new co-workers who know just a little bit of what DNS is. Usually, it's their understanding of how a person finds a website or gets email to someone. And that's pretty much it.

So, I'm considering a primer of what DNS is, what it does, why it's important, what role A/MX/www records play, and the like.

What have you seen online, preferably with graphics, that you've used to explain to people what's going on in such a foreign concept? Or, how have you explained this subject?

Yes, I know there are Internet for Idiots-type books out there and Wikipedia entries, but that is a Step 3, and we're just on Step 1.

Who to file a complaint with for a problem with a US locality domain registrar?

Anonymous — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:34:27 -0800

Who is the appropriate party to file a complaint with, for a problem with a US locality (*.portland.or.us, NOT *.us) domain registrar that is not updating DNS records as requested? Five years ago or so, it took over a year (not joking...) for the registrar update my DNS records and only after numerous emails, faxes, and letters. Time to move servers again, and I've already waited over a month with no results. The registrar's website says they are going to start charging for this wonderful service next year. Who can I complain to about their current service so I might see some action taken on my DNS request; who can I complain to to suggest *.portland.or.us domains be moved to another registrar?

CNAME a domain and delegate the subdomain

qvantamon — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:33:35 -0800

Can I CNAME a second-level domain, and delegate a subdomain to a nameserver? What if the nameserver is the same for both? So here's my problem: I have a page at example.freehost.com, and I want to:
1) Buy domain example.com and forward (www.)example.com to example.freehost.com via CNAME.
2) Buy hosting for a subpart of the site (say, forum.example.com), in a host that uses cPanel (which means I should be able to delegate NS for forum.example.com to them).

The added complication is that I want to buy the domain and the hosting from the same company, which means the nameserver for forum.example.com could end up being the same as the one for example.com

So, in summary I want to have entries like these:

example.com CNAME example.freehost.com
www.example.com CNAME example.freehost.com
forum.example.com NS 1.1.1.1
forum.example.com NS 1.1.1.2

And on 1.1.1.1 & 1.1.1.2, the normal cpanel entries...
forum.example.com A [myhostsip]
forum.example.com MX [myhostsip]
blah blah blah etc etc.

My first question is - Is that a valid configuration (cnaming the second-level and delegating the third level)

My second question is: can I have both entries in 1.1.1.1 & 1.1.1.2 (that is, have the NS entry be a self-reference)?

Or will this self-reference make the internets asplode?

Also, if I can, will I be able to do it by just managing my DNS entries, and asking the hosting guys to put forum.example.com on cPanel, or will this require some black magic in part of the hosts? (which means they probably won't do, since I'm aiming for a cheap host)

.int needs a .com FQDN set up. Who in the what now?

bartleby — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 09:42:05 -0800

DNSfilter: Trying to help some folks install new software, which requires a FQDN to run its server component. But their domain is an .int domain (they're not sure how they ended up with that, not being an NGO) which won't work. So I'm stuck guessing how to get a folks.com FQDN set up under folks.int. Can you point me at some resources? So:
1) how would they have ended up with a .int TLD? They're not working for the UN or anything.

2) this is new to me, and my guesses seem to be wrong or uninformed.
Server 2003, domain controller, went into DNS settings, Forward lookup zones, trying to create an Alias CNAME, not working so well.

It can't be very hard, but they kind of need it Now, so I'm stuck not knowing much DNS magic and not much time to learn.

Why does my web site show up for everyone but me?

bflora — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 10:56:28 -0800

I've got a web site that shows up just fine for everyone except me. I get a big fat "page not found" when I navigate to it even though it works fine in proxy browsers, I've used ipconfig/flushdns and cleared my browser cache. I'm sure it's a DNS issue of some sort, but have no idea what else to do. Help?

Free linux dynamic dns hosting?

Thoth — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 08:39:35 -0800

What is the best Linux friendly free dynamic DNS hosting provider? I'm in the process of setting up a server at home that I would like to access from work etc, so I'm after a good free dns service that features an automatic update client which runs reliably on Linux.

A google search of "dynamic dns" and many other permutations thereof throws up what seems to be about a million "free" dns providers, so I would be eager to find out if there is any consensus on what's good out there.

Thanks very much!

ISP hijacks invalid URLs—sometimes

adamrice — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:37:11 -0800

NetworkFilter: I have a bizarre and arcane-seeming problem with my home network, the Internet, and my ISP's DNS. Invalid URLs are being redirected to the ISP's search page—in some cases. If I type in a partial URL like "amazon", normally I'd expect my browser to figure out that I meant amazon.com and go there. And indeed, it worked that way until about two weeks ago.

At that point (with no changes at my end), I started getting redirected to a special page run by my ISP (grandecom.com) that attempts to monetize my laziness by showing me ads. I realize there's been a lot of this kind of thing with a lot of different ISPs lately.

I have two Macs running 10.5, connected via cat-5, and one Mac running 10.4 connected via wifi, all running into the same old-ish Netgear router (which has current firmware). What I've just figured out is that the wifi-connected Mac does not encounter this redirect; when I connect any of my computers directly to the cable modem, I also don't encounter it.

I've spoken to my ISP's tech support a couple of times. One guy had never even heard of this redirect page and expressed surprise that it exists. The other had heard of it, but claimed there hadn't been a lot of complaints relating to it. And because the problem went away when I took my router out of the loop, he's inclined to blame it.

Clearly the ISP's DNS is implicated, and I am not satisfied with this response, or lack of solution. I'm wondering if anyone has encountered anything like this, or can shed light on it.

need help with receiving emails from outside domains on exchange server 2003

antisocialiting — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 09:32:02 -0800

How to set up MX records on on a DDNS server (zone edit to receive outside domains email) I have a Win2k3 server with exchange server installed on it. I use a ddns system (zone edit.com)because my isp is comcast and its just a small home server. I am able to send and receive internal emails with no problem. I am able to send to out side domains like gmail and yahoo but if I try and reply to them I get non delivery notifications. My question is 1st. what should be the mx record I use for zone edit if I should use that at all. 2nd do I need to make changes to my dns server like add reverse look up? 3rd is this something I should set up directly on the exchange server and if so what. any links to wlakthroughs etc would be very helpful. thank you in advance for any help.

Why Am I getting 404 errors for legitimate web pages while casually browsing?

smersh — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 01:58:12 -0800

While casually surfing, why am I getting 404 errors for pages that definitely exist (like google and facebook)? How can I stop it? While casually surfing, I get at least five Hostgator 404 errors a day, for pages that definitely exist. Pages on google, on major websites like ign.com, facebook, etc.

I'm in India, surfing on a MacBook Pro, Safari, Leopard (though I've seen it on Firefox and on OS 10.4). I think it has to do with my ISP, but I'm not sure. It could be my wireless router (Airport Express).

My annoying remedy is to change my DNS Server information to OpenDNS when a page doesn't work (208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220). But, I get the same 404 page errors at the same frequency.

The switching of DNS servers ALWAYS helps immediately, but never long term. That is, it'll allow me to see the page/site right away, but another legitimate page will give me a 404 some time later.

Please help me. I'm really hoping that my configurations are doing this somehow, but I don't know how.

thanks!