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It is damn irritating to see our national major ISPs’ nameservers failed to resolve/fail on RBL lookup while the rest of the world seem to be able to resolve just fine.

Mar 19 10:56:22 mail postfix/smtpd[47414]: warning: 53.48.14.24.sbl.spamhaus.org: RBL lookup error: Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=53.48.14.24.sbl.spamhaus.org type=A: Host not found, try again
Mar 19 10:56:24 mail postfix/smtpd[47449]: warning: 140.201.248.143.sbl.spamhaus.org: RBL lookup error: Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=140.201.248.143.sbl.spamhaus.org type=A: Host not found, try again


Solution?

Ended up hosting my own forwarding/caching nameserver at Singapore. Surprisingly, it is more reliable and faster than the Malaysian ISPs ones. Sigh! (Though mine is dedicated host.)

Query benchmarking route are illustrated as below:-

Query on 140.201.248.143.sbl.spamhaus.org

[chflags@hostIDC /home/chflags/]$ time -p dig @192.228.128.18 140.201.248.143.sbl.spamhaus.org
; <<>> DiG 9.3.3 <<>> @192.228.128.18 140.201.248.143.sbl.spamhaus.org
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 28813
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;140.201.248.143.sbl.spamhaus.org. IN A
;; Query time: 3401 msec
;; SERVER: 192.228.128.18#53(192.228.128.18)
;; WHEN: Mon Mar 19 13:11:40 2007
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 50
real 3.40
user 0.00
sys 0.00
[chflags@sapphire /home/chflags/]$ time dig @202.188.0.133 140.201.248.143.sbl.spamhaus.org
; <<>> DiG 9.3.3 <<>> @202.188.0.133 140.201.248.143.sbl.spamhaus.org
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 26336
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;140.201.248.143.sbl.spamhaus.org. IN A
;; Query time: 2009 msec
;; SERVER: 202.188.0.133#53(202.188.0.133)
;; WHEN: Mon Mar 19 13:11:53 2007
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 50
real 0m12.037s
user 0m0.009s
sys 0m0.018s
[chflags@sapphire /home/chflags/]$ time dig @203.117.x.x 140.201.248.143.sbl.spamhaus.org
; <<>> DiG 9.3.3 <<>> @203.117.x.x 140.201.248.143.sbl.spamhaus.org
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 56055
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;140.201.248.143.sbl.spamhaus.org. IN A
;; Query time: 313 msec
;; SERVER: 203.117.x.x#53(203.117.x.x)
;; WHEN: Mon Mar 19 13:14:21 2007
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 50
real 0m0.339s
user 0m0.014s
sys 0m0.012s

Query on 53.48.14.24.sbl.spamhaus.org

[chflags@hostIDC /home/chflags/]$ time -p dig @192.228.128.18 53.48.14.24.sbl.spamhaus.org
; <<>> DiG 9.3.3 <<>> @192.228.128.18 53.48.14.24.sbl.spamhaus.org
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
real 15.00
user 0.00
sys 0.00
[chflags@sapphire /home/chflags/]$ time dig @202.188.0.133 53.48.14.24.sbl.spamhaus.org
; <<>> DiG 9.3.3 <<>> @202.188.0.133 53.48.14.24.sbl.spamhaus.org
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
real 0m15.034s
user 0m0.013s
sys 0m0.013s
[chflags@sapphire /home/chflags/]$ time dig @203.117.x.x 53.48.14.24.sbl.spamhaus.org
; <<>> DiG 9.3.3 <<>> @203.117.x.x 53.48.14.24.sbl.spamhaus.org
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 12276
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;53.48.14.24.sbl.spamhaus.org. IN A
;; Query time: 345 msec
;; SERVER: 203.117.x.x#53(203.117.x.x)
;; WHEN: Mon Mar 19 13:15:21 2007
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 46
real 0m0.372s
user 0m0.017s
sys 0m0.010s
Conclusions

Need to say more?

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.