SwedishChef's Journal: Lame uplink providers

Our reverse lookups failed suddenly two weeks ago and a dig showed that they were stopping because no one had SOA. So I called my provider who opened a trouble ticket and then told me that the problem was with a swip that didn't go through and it would be fixed later that day.

A week later it was still broken and I began a series of emails with the network engineer for this outfit who insisted, over and over, that it was our DNS that was broken. While I tried to convince him that it was their fault because we could not get SOA (Start of Authority) for the block and they had to point their DNS to ours and secondary it.. Finally after a couple days of this nonsense I called ARIN which told me that it was the uplink provider's fault and, just as I suspected, they needed to secondary my DNS onto their DNS.

To get this more formally I sent an email to ARIN (with a copy to my uplink morons) asking them to clarify what to do and who should do it. Two hours later I got an email from a network engineer upstream of the uplink provider (but still controlled by them) saying "I don't see a problem". Because they had implemented a secondary DNS off mine and it finally worked.

Every time I contact these guys with a problem I have to teach someone their job. And it takes time. Maybe I should send them a bill for that time. Sigh. Apparently it's not possible to hire competent people and equally impossible to get rid of them when they show they are incompetent.