Evaggelos Balaskas - System Engineer

There is a big difference between communication and understanding.

Here is a DNS story:

The Internet Bank of Ebal (paraphrasing customer’s name) has their own Authoritative NameServer for their zone.
In the company i am currently working, we provide a secondary dns service.

Bellow the steps/instructions we provide to our customers - in order of action:

1. Inform the customer to allow zone transfer to our Lans
2. We confirm the zone transfer
3. Inform the customer to add our secondary NameServers to his zone
   (NS records inside their dns zone)
4. Provisioning the service aka add configuration to our NameServers
   and finally
5. inform customer to add our NameServers to the Registry of .gr Domain Names

Just to be perfectly clear - we keep these steps simply cause from our experience not every DNS administrator understand what they must/should do.

So here are the steps the bank’s administrator did:

1. Add one of our NameServers into registry of .gr domain names
2. Allow zone transfer to our Lans.

in that order!

They raised a complain that we dont provide the secondary service and a lot of bank’s customer cant access their site (obviously)!

We re-inform the customer with the actions/steps and we specific told them to REMOVE our nameserver from the registry of .gr domains till WE confirm that everything is ok.

Below the new steps the bank’s administrator did:

1. Add one more of our NameServers into registry of .gr domains names.

So we have a new problem.

I told the administrator (in writing) to remove something and they did the exactly opposite.
Still (at the time of writing this blog post) they havent add our nameservers into their zone
(step number #3).

At this moment i cant think of how to resolve the real problem: “The problem of communication to the point of understanding”

UPDATE:
Seems that we are still having problems with this customer!
The administrator of the bank chose to update the authoritative nameservers on the registry .gr domains.
They removed our authoritative nameservers (acting as secondary) and added our caching nameservers.