The PhoneBoy Blog


Simplifying Telecom, Mobile Phones, Gadgets, Health, and More!

phoneboy.org and Fun with DNS

As you might have noticed (but most likely not), my information security blogged moved from securitytheater.phoneboy.com to phoneboy.org. This is because I was gifted the domain by the guy who originally registered it, but decided he didn’t want it anymore. He would have rather seen it be legitimately be used versus become a spam farm or something.

Of course this meant transferring the domain between registrars (which took several days for some reason) and then moving the DNS to CloudFlare, which provides a wonderful free CDN and DNS hosting for smaller sites like mine.

While it’s not unusual for name resolution to be squirrelly for a day or two after a registrar and nameserver change, it’s pretty unusual for persistent problems to still occur five days after such a change. Particularly one that is acting somewhat inconsistent.

I run a DNS server at home that queries a few different external DNS services. When I ran dig against phoneboy.org., I was getting different results. I narrowed it down to a resolver for OpenDNS that was exhibiting this behaviors (others were not):

I stumbled across a site that OpenDNS runs called CacheCheck that, strangely, was not showing inconsistent behavior on this page. Even so, I took a leap of faith and clicked the “refresh cache” button. Low and behold, the inconsistency problem suddenly went away and I was getting consistent, correct results from dig once again.

Hopefully this solves the problem once and for all. You’d think after a few decades we’d have this DNS thing sorted by now, but even in 2016, these kinds of issues still crop up.


#Cybersecurity Evangelist, Podcaster, #noagenda Producer, Frequenter of shiny metal tubes, Expressor of personal opinions, and of course, a coffee achiever.