Lazy DNS

I had a call this morning from a customer who wanted me to come down because their mail server was broken. They had experienced an ISP outage, which subsequently was fixed, but their mail server wasn't getting anything still.

I was actually ready to go out the door when I thought to just double check reality, and that check kept me sitting right here:

$ dig +short xyz.com mx
10 mail.xyz.com.xyz.com.
20 mail2.xyz.com.xyz.com.

Ooops.. that certainly can't be right. I told the client that his MX records were munged, but he came back with a screen from the DNS providers tools that seemed to show them correctly. It looked something like this:

I told him to try taking out the ".xyz.com", but he said the tool told him that was invalid.. at which point I smiled to myself and knew what he had to do.

Do you know what he needed to do to fix this?

Answer

Finnish Translation by Thor Kottelin available at /Detective/lazy_dns.fi.html
Swedish Translation by Thor Kottelin available at /Detective/lazy_dns.sv.html

Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal

Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon

Take Control of Screen Sharing in Leopard

Take Control of Permissions in Leopard

Jump to Comments

Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them. I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. I also may own stock in companies mentioned here. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.

Specific links that take you to pages that allow you to purchase the item I reviewed are very likely to pay me a commission. Many of the books I review were given to me by the publishers specifically for the purpose of writing a review. These gifts and referral fees do not affect my opinions; I often give bad reviews anyway.

We use Google third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, click here.