Over the past hour I’ve had DNS failures coming from my upstream provider. As a result, this server could not resolve hostnames.

This is somewhat inconvenient, since there are several services on this server that require domain name resolution to work correctly. For example, the statistics package I’m running resolves domains on every hit. So every page load is slow.

Also, the FTP server relies on DNS resolution for some reason. Not sure why. So does the email server, but that makes more sense. In any case, none of those services were working quite right.

I have since added a redundant DNS entry to my /etc/resolv.conf file to help mitigate the situation of when the primary DNS server goes down. That’s pretty inconvenient. You’d think that these servers would come with some redundancy built in. Perhaps not.

Anyhow, it seems to be working now. What I did must have been effective, since I still can’t ping the IP of the original DNS server.