[AusNOG] Strange DNS issue

[CAS Netlink Support]

Hello All,

We had a .NET domain expire last Thursday. We renewed it straight away 
but it took around 24 hours for Intaserve to fix an issue they were 
saying they had with domainpeople.com where their system wasn't 
communicating which in turn prevented the domain from updating to active 
again. This issue was fixed Friday afternoon around 5PM.

When we check the WHOIS record it has the correct nameservers.  When we 
do a dig on USA servers it is all fine - everything resolves as it 
should. When we do a dig through Telstra or NCable it fails.

Telstra connected server:
root at mail:/etc/mail# dig xxxxx.net mx

; <<>> DiG 9.5.1-P2 <<>> xxxxx.net mx
;; global options:  printcmd
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

NCable/TransACT connected server:
root at mail:/home/support# dig xxxxx.net any

; <<>> DiG 9.4.1-P1 <<>> xxxxx.net any
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 12516
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;xxxxx.net.                    IN      ANY

;; Query time: 3090 msec
;; SERVER: 203.208.64.11#53(203.208.64.11)
;; WHEN: Sun Oct 28 11:15:07 2012
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 28

Am I right in thinking it is probably that the domain had a long expire 
time? The refresh was set to 86400, but it seems like it is being 
ignored or it doesn't figure in how long DNS servers will wait before 
refreshing the domain. During the time that the domain was expired and 
Intaserve was broken, the dns servers were changed to their expired 
domain DNS servers so perhaps Telstra and TransACT are still querying 
those servers but the domain has now been removed from them? Although 
the 'no servers could be reached' error concerns me.

Gary