Check your site's DNS servers

[techAdmin]

Came across this useful site, you can check to make sure that the DNS end of things is working well. That's a step in debugging search engine problems. Small tool but useful I think.

[vkaryl]

Yep - works like a charm! I use it about once a week (probably overkill!), don't have se problems to worry about but it would be a treasure for those who do!

[MatthewHSE]

I've used this in the past, but just now gave it a try on a new domain I'm using on a new host. I got three "Failed" notices and two "Warnings." I'm not sure if this is a big deal or not; here are the errors I got, which are mostly Greek to me and I'd sure like some second opinions on if these are actually serious or not! ;)

Failed:
Missing (stealth) nameservers

:: Quote ::

FAIL: You have one or more missing (stealth) nameservers. The following nameserver(s) are listed (at your nameservers) as nameservers for your domain, but are not listed at the the parent nameservers (therefore, they may or may not get used, depending on whether your DNS servers return them in the authority section for other requests, per RFC2181 5.4.1). You need to make sure that these stealth nameservers are working; if they are not responding, you may have serious problems! The DNS Report will not query these servers, so you need to be very careful that they are working properly.

ns2.thehostIuse.net.

This is listed as an ERROR because there are some cases where nasty problems can occur (if the TTLs vary from the NS records at the root servers and the NS records point to your own domain, for example).

Failed:
Stealth NS record leakage

:: Quote ::

Your DNS servers leak stealth information in non-NS requests:

Stealth nameservers are leaked [ns2.thehostIuse.net.]!

This can cause some serious problems (especially if there is a TTL discrepancy). If you must have stealth NS records (NS records listed at the authoritative DNS servers, but not the parent DNS servers), you should make sure that your DNS server does not leak the stealth NS records in response to other queries.

Failed:
Duplicate MX records

:: Quote ::

WARNING: You have duplicate MX records. This means that mailservers may try delivering mail to the same IP more than once. Although technically valid, this is very confusing, and wastes resources. The duplicate MX records are:

smtp.mydomain.com. and mydomain.com. both resolve to my.new.ip.ad.

Warning:
SOA REFRESH value

:: Quote ::

WARNING: Your SOA REFRESH interval is : 28800 seconds. This seems a bit high. You should consider decreasing this value to about 3600-7200 seconds. RFC1912 2.2 recommends a value between 1200 to 43200 seconds (20 minutes to 12 hours, with the longer time periods used for very slow Internet connections; 12 hours seems very high to us), and if you are using DNS NOTIFY the refresh value is not as important (RIPE recommends 86400 seconds if using DNS NOTIFY). This value determines how often secondary/slave nameservers check with the master for updates. A value that is too high will cause DNS changes to be in limbo for a long time.

Warning:
SPF record
This one doesn't bother me; I've heard arguments both for and against SPF records and so far, it doesn't seem to make any difference if you have one or not.

[techAdmin]

Hi MatthewHSE, I just checked my own nameservers, and except for not having a postmaster@site.com setup, all I got were warnings.

I think this is a classic case of why I use only high end hosters and registrars.

I've seen posting after posting on forums about various hoster and registrar issues, and they almost all boil down to either cut rate or incompetently run servers, dns, web, whatever.

Yet another reason to love Pair.com