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To: Gary Clark II <gclarkii@main.gbdata.com>
cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Strange error on Freefall 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 17 Sep 1996 08:14:31 PDT."
             <199609171514.KAA16313@main.gbdata.com> 
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Date: Tue, 17 Sep 1996 13:46:24 PDT
From: Bill Fenner <fenner@parc.xerox.com>
Message-Id: <96Sep17.134629pdt.177476@crevenia.parc.xerox.com>
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In message <199609171514.KAA16313@main.gbdata.com> you write:
>Why does the DNS return both variables consistly, one to ping
>and the other to telnet and rlogin???

Looks to me like the DNS is round-robining:

PING srimain.srisoft.com (198.66.103.161): 56 data bytes
PING srimain.srisoft.com (207.90.208.225): 56 data bytes
PING srimain.srisoft.com (198.66.103.161): 56 data bytes

That was just three ping's right in a row on freefall.  Then two telnets in a row:

freefall% telnet srimain.srisoft.com
Trying 207.90.208.225...
^C
freefall% telnet srimain.srisoft.com
Trying 198.66.103.161...
^C

No deterministic behavior here.  Note also that if you let the connection attempt to the 198 address time out, telnet will connect to the 207 address and work:

freefall% telnet srimain.srisoft.com
Trying 198.66.103.161...
telnet: connect to address 198.66.103.161: No route to host
Trying 207.90.208.255...
Connected to srimain.srisoft.com.


Both primary servers for srisoft.com only give out the 207 address.  However, the TTL on the records that they are giving out is 3 days, and there are 25 hours left on the 198 address.  So it appears likely that the name servers for srisoft.com gave out the 198 address a little less than 2 days ago, and freefall's default name server is caching it.

  Bill