Is my zone file transfered to your secondary name servers?

[miguel]

Hello and thank you for your free service.

I signed up to benefit from your backup MX service. Of course, I realised soon after, this wouldn't be very useful without backup NS, so I set it up also. My domain is anjos.strangled.net.
Almost everything seems to be working fine, your mail server relayed a few mails for me already, except when I do:
# host anjos.strangled.net ns1.rollernet.us
it doesn't show anything and I'm not sure if my zone file is really being transfered to you. All I know, from my firewall logs, is that I'm sending you notifies...
I have allowed transfers to the IP addresses of your nameservers...

I use freedns.afraid.org for my domain, but my nameserver at home should be the authority for anjos.strangled.net Is it possible that your nameserver is asking for the zone to the wrong nameserver?

Question number 2: I have the impression that your backup mx tries to send mail to the primary mx every 20 seconds, is that so? Perhaps that's too often for me, because when my server is down it stays down for the whole night... Isn't that a waste of your bandwidth? Couldn't it be costumizable?

Miguel Ramos
Lisboa, Portugal

[RollerNetSupport]

This is the error from our logs:

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Feb 22 08:13:02 isidore named[28579]: transfer of 'anjos.strangled.net/IN' from 87.196.140.23#53: failed to connect: timed out
Feb 22 08:13:02 isidore named[28579]: transfer of 'anjos.strangled.net/IN' from 87.196.140.23#53: end of transfer

A manual transfer failed too:

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$ dig anjos.strangled.net axfr

; <<>> DiG 9.2.4 <<>> anjos.strangled.net axfr
;; global options:  printcmd
; Transfer failed.

So, something just isn't allowing the transfer. I can't tell what that may be from my end.

The mail servers will release the queue according to an increasing scale; the first retry is 15 minutes. If that fails, the next retry will be 30 minutes, and so on up to a maximum interval between attempts of 48 hours. I looked at your log entries, and everything looks normal. The time indicator in the logs is how long it's been waiting; it's a delay time.

[miguel]

Thank you for your answer.

Perhaps what I wanted to do is not possible.
I'm using tcpdump now. The notifies I'm sending to ns1.rollernet.us are being refused. Perhaps because my IP address changes, perhaps because of name servers at afraid.org...

About the test you made, perhaps I was making changes to my configuration, I assume the time of the test it shilfted at least 5 hours from GMT.

Thank you, I'm going to rethink what I want to do, and see if I can find a solution. Anyway you told me what I needed to know, that when it is working, I will be able to do host anjos.strangled.net ns1.rollernet.us from here (as it had to be).

Miguel