Some time back, a friend asked me to provide backup DNS for his domains, including some commercial ones, and I was happy to oblige. But it turns out that he never put ns2.brouhaha.com into the registrar’s records for the domain. So now those domains depend on his server and my primary, both of which burned up in the fire, but not on my backup which is still working.
I added another IP address to my backup DNS/MX server, changed all the named config files to be master rather than slave, and changed the IP address of ns.brouhaha.com to point to the new IP address. So now DNS works for all of my domains. But not for my friend. Although ns.brouhaha.com now responds and is authoritative for his domain, it was registered through Network Solutions, and since I don’t have an account with them, there doesn’t appear to be any way I can get them to change the IP address of ns.brouhaha.com in their database. My friend’s domains will not resolve successfully until they do this. Sigh.
He’s away on a business trip now, so it’s hard for him to take care of this.
Lesson: make sure you have at least two authoritative name servers for your domain, at physically separate locations and on independent networks.