We now have two different sets of DNS servers. First set is authoritative name servers, which ONLY SERVES domains being hosted by TowardEX. These servers are non-recursive, and will not answer queries to any domains that are not authoritative to TowardEX (i.e., yahoo.com, etc).
The second set of name servers is strict 'resolver' dns servers. The resolver dns servers do not host any authoritative zones. These servers are recursive and will simply answer queries to anything. The IP address block that holds these resolver dns servers is an "anycast" route, which means the resolver dns IP block is announced from every one of our POPs. Any user that is using the resolver dns will use the closest resolver that is situated in user's connecting POP, as result of anycast routing.
Due to the above changes, you must use the either of the following authoritative DNS servers in order to have TowardEX host your zone file, whether in master or slave mode:
NS1.TWDX.NET 216.93.240.1
NS2.TWDX.NET 69.41.244.254
NS3.TWDX.NET 216.93.250.1
If you are a downstream user of our network, you can use the following set of resolver dns addresses in your TCP/IP settings:
216.93.240.240
216.93.250.250
The routes for above two resolver servers are announced by services switches residing in different POPs (aka, "anycast"). So when your computer tries to reach above DNS servers to resolve a domain, it will get to the closest one.
Some Technical Stuff... Read it if you like it, don't if you don't care :)
Additionally, because a lot of queries to the internet root servers are RFC1918 bogus requests (requests such as 10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x, 192.168.x.x, etc), we are locally housing an AS112 (For more info, visit www.as112.net) dns server at our main POP for our users. If you are a downstream user of our network, you can use the following command to verify that your RFC1918 queries are being handled by our AS112 dns server (If you are not a user of our network, the output of the following command will be from a public AS112 dns server at internet exchange points.):
dig @prisoner.iana.org hostname.as112.net any
The response should look something like this:
;; ANSWER SECTION:
hostname.as112.net. 5M IN SOA as112.twdx.net. hostmaster.towardex.com. (
2004032001 ; serial
1H ; refresh
10M ; retry
4w2d ; expiry
15S ) ; minimum
hostname.as112.net. 5M IN TXT "TowardEX Technologies, Inc. TowardEX Internet Services"
hostname.as112.net. 5M IN TXT "Anycast AS112 server reporting from Boston"
hostname.as112.net. 5M IN TXT "Unicast IP: 65.124.17.18"
hostname.as112.net. 5M IN TXT "See http://www.twdx.net/ for our web site."
hostname.as112.net. 5M IN TXT "See http://as112.net/ for more information."
hostname.as112.net. 5M IN NS blackhole-2.iana.org.
hostname.as112.net. 5M IN NS blackhole-1.iana.org.
;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
blackhole-1.iana.org. 59m50s IN A 192.175.48.6
blackhole-2.iana.org. 59m50s IN A 192.175.48.42
;; Total query time: 8 msec
;; FROM: eagle.twdx.net to SERVER: prisoner.iana.org 192.175.48.1
;; WHEN: Sat Mar 20 04:55:50 2004
;; MSG SIZE sent: 36 rcvd: 485
You can also verify connectivity to your closest AS112 server by running a traceroute command to blackhole-1.iana.org:
traceroute blackhole-1.iana.orgtraceroute to prisoner.iana.org (192.175.48.1), 64 hops max, 44 byte packets 1 305.gig1-2.r1.bos.twdx.net (65.124.16.1) 0.449 ms 0.431 ms 0.488 ms 2 101.ge-0-0-0.c1.bos.twdx.net (65.116.132.33) 0.215 ms 0.196 ms 0.226 ms 3 fe0-24-104.r4.bur.twdx.net (65.116.132.42) 0.627 ms 0.669 ms 0.507 ms 4 blackhole-1.iana.org (192.175.48.6) 1.085 ms 0.456 ms 0.311 ms
The above changes will allow unified setup of DNS services for now and future, and hopefully this announcement on our web page should clear up some confusions for our users :). As usual, email all your questions regarding this to ip-admin@twdx.net.