Its been almost a month since I last updated here but the annual holiday and some project work pretty much ate up that time. Getting back into the swing and getting all the plates spinning again has been a challenge and while fixing the variety of problems that clients reported I picked up on a useful tool.
The issue was twofold – a domain had been hijacked or at least the web site related to it had and secondly a related domain was not responding at all.
Once it was confirmed that the first website was intact and that in fact it was a site ranked first on a Google search for the domain name in question was in fact hacked. This then lead to the second problem why was the other domain not resolving to the intact web site as it had been previously.
Identifying the provider responsible for the site lead me to the tool that intodns.com provide and the simple mechanism I could use to get the information required.
The site describes itself as
IntoDNS checks the health and configuration and provides DNS report and mail servers report.
And provides suggestions to fix and improve them, with references to protocols’ official documentation.
As an example using http://www.intodns.com/ibm.com where ibm.com is the site I’m using to illustrate passing a domain to the tool gives a huge amount of useful info such as
Nameserver records returned by the parent servers are:
internet-server.zurich.ibm.com. [‘195.176.20.204’] [TTL=172800]
ns.almaden.ibm.com. [‘198.4.83.35’] [TTL=172800]
ns.austin.ibm.com. [‘192.35.232.34’] [TTL=172800]
ns.watson.ibm.com. [‘129.34.20.80’] [TTL=172800]
h.gtld-servers.net was kind enough to give us that information.
Using this information I was able to identify the provider who was responsible for the domain (and whom had said that they had transferred the domain some months before in another conversation with them) and get them to reinstate the link between this domain and one hosting a web site with content.
I really liked the means of submitting the domain name in the url and would suggest that this is a good start for your research into DNS and MX issues as they arise for you or your clients.