ARK I.T. INDY

I have had an intermittent issue with accessing .co.uk websites. I haven’t dealt with it as I was only reminded of it during the times I would be on Fark. It became one of those issues where I’ll remember to deal with it in the morning since I usually do my time wasting at night. The last thing I want to do is track down a name resolution problem. As it turns out, as it can many times, the symptoms I experienced were one of many that was actually part of a larger issue. It’s actually an issue with Top Level Domains. I found the answer with the always helpful SBS server blog. Iam using Small Business Server 2008 but it applies to all 2008 server editions providing the DNS role.

The official answer is “When the DNS server saves the NS records to the cache, the TTL for the A (Glue) record gets changed to be 1 day. The TTL for the NS Record stays at 2 days. When the A records expire, the DNS server starts returning a “Server Failure” response to the client that issues the dns query”

The resolution is as pointed out in KB 968372

1. Start Registry Editor (regedit.exe).

2. Locate the following registry key:

3. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\DNS\Parameters

4. On the Edit menu, click New, click DWORD (32-bit) Value, and then add the following value:
Value: MaxCacheTTL
Data Type: DWORD
Data value: 2A300 (172800 seconds in decimal, or 2 days) (the KB says to use 0×2A300 but you’ll find it won’t accept that)

5. Click OK.

6. Quit Registry Editor.

7. Restart the DNS Server service