Everything's back up, and lessons learned...

Good day,

I'm happy to report I've got our domain and servers back up and running, and I thought I'd share part of what I went through in an effort to save someone else from making the same mistake I did.

THE INITIAL PROBLEM: Reverse DNS records. Of course. This was, in fact, Comcast's issue and I feel it took longer for them to correct than it should have (two days?!). I agree with other posters who have said there needs to be a better mechanism in place, for those of us who are self-hosted and need reverse DNS entries, to get them set up.

THE NEXT ISSUE: After getting the reverse records straightened out, our systems were still not appearing on the public Internet and DNS was not propagating for us. After much back-and-forth with Comcast, I discovered the issue was on my end and it was so bloody simple I can easily see how I would have missed it.

In two words: Glue records.

When you register domain names, with a provider like Moniker, you also have to tell them how you're handling DNS. This includes providing both the host names AND IP addresses for your DNS server(s). In my case, it turns out the glue records were still pointing to the old DNS servers from my previous account (which, of course, no longer exist).

Once I corrected these, DNS started propagating like wildfire, and all of a sudden I could see our domain start popping up all over the place.

So, to paraphrase a great line from the Indiana Jones flicks: "Trust in RDNS -- But CHECK YOUR GLUE RECORDS!"

Keep the peace(es).