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.
