Question

I am new to BIND, and thought I had a grip on DNS, but obviously I was mistaken.

BIND is installed on Windows Server 2008 Web

1. I created a zone (example.com) with Dyn.
2. I registered the domain for that zone successfully, using the Dyn nameservers
3. I created two subdomains (A records) on the Dyn zone: ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com
4. Each subdomain points to a unique IP, bound to my server where BIND is listening

When I query ns1.example.com with nslookup, for the a new domain I created on that webserver, it returns ns1 with its ip, but gives the following error:

DNS request timed out.
    timeout was 2 seconds.

DNS request timed out.
    timeout was 2 seconds.

DNS request timed out.
    timeout was 2 seconds.

DNS request timed out.
    timeout was 2 seconds.

*** Request to ns1.example.com timed-out

If I run nslookup on the webserver itself, with the same query, I get:

> example.com

Server:  ns1.example.com (which is the slected nameserver)

Address:  xx.xx.xx.xx


Name:    example.com

Address:  xx.xx.xx.xx

It might be worth mentioning, that the Webserver is located in the UK, and I am located in South Africa.

My registrar, in South Africa, returns the following when I try to register domainxyz.example:

The SOA record for domainxyz.example at xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx can not be retreived.
The most common reasons for this is that the Nameserver is not currently
reachable or the Nameserver has not been configured for this domain.

I can ping and resolve ns1 and ns2 from my pc, where the nslookup fails.

Answer 1

After a long discussion with myself, and curiously reviewing my post… I decided I must be really burnt out.. and I opened UDP port 53 on my windows firewall on the server.

Tadaaa…..works!

Sometimes it helps bouncing something off someone, even if its a lonely sunday night web page /forum.

Maybe this helps someone else in the future. This whole new web server commisioning has so many aspects to configure, and I lost site of the basics.

Cheers, and thanks..!