Start of Authority record problems

simond

New Member
When troubleshooting an issue related to our new email server. We discovered an issue with our SOA record.

A DNS lookup using MXToolbox.com on our domain chowchillaelem.k12.ca.us gives the message "We were not able to find a Start of Authority (SOA) record which may indicate a DNS problem. "

Is this a configuration issue with my ZoneEdit DNS settings?

Everything seemed to be working fine until after we moved to a new email server but I don't know that we made any DNS changes that would affect this.
 

zeadmin

Administrator
Staff member
Hi,

I just did a manual check and I honestly don't know why mxtoolbox should complain. Please see my tests below:

$ dig @dns1.zoneedit.com. chowchillaelem.k12.ca.us. +short SOA
dns0.zoneedit.com. zone.zoneedit.com. 1525213857 3600 600 604800 300
$ dig @dns2.zoneedit.com. chowchillaelem.k12.ca.us. +short SOA
dns0.zoneedit.com. zone.zoneedit.com. 1525213857 3600 600 604800 300

Our nameservers are returning SOAs, and I did a recursive query right from the root servers and everything is ok. And definitely, changing to a new email server won't cause such an issue. You may regard mxtoolbox's as a false positive.
 

simond

New Member
I would love to ignore it except that we have been getting intermittent DNS results from several other tools (it works, then a few hours later it doesn't) and we have been experiencing blocked email on various lists because we "don't have reverse DNS configured properly." Some tools report reverse DNS working, some don't. I latched on to MToolbox.com because it was the only one giving me consistent and meaningful responses from day to day.

Your command line specifies ZoneEdit as the DNS to use so I'm wondering if there's a problem beyond our configuration. Our DNS is complicated by several hosted services and internal vs. external DNS differences as well as the chain of ownership of our IP addresses. We have a 3rd party hosted SPAM filter and web site.

We are a school so our IP addresses are allotted to our regional COE who alloted a range to our county's COE who alloted a range to us. There was an entry in the county COE's DNS that was wrong and prevented us from receiving email from some places but not others. The problems cleared up when they removed the entry. I'm wondering if they should have corrected the entries instead of removing them or setup some kind of rDNS forwarder for our address range?

I've been working on this for a week so I don't think propagation is the problem.
 
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