[TriLUG] Google lookup problems...

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Okay, I specifically waited until after April fools day to post this.  
Has anyone else had problems resolving www.google.com?  I want to know 
if I'm going crazy, or if it's some systemic problem that I haven't 
chased down yet.  Both from home, and work, at various times, Firefox 
(and Mozilla, and everything else that depends on the resolver library) 
is unable to search or resolve google.

I'm curious, before I go reporting this to Google, to make sure I'm not 
the only one seeing this problem.  Perhaps I'm just loosing my mind.

I have chased the problem thoroughly with dig, and the only thing that 
looks out of place is that ns1.google.com will provide glue records for 
a.l.google.com through d.l.google.com, but if you query for NS records 
for l.google.com at any of those servers, you get no responses.  I think 
if the cache of those A records ends up expiring before the cache of 
www.l.google.com, it will fail to properly look them up again by trying 
to hit l.google.com for NS records, and then negatively cache the record 
for 15 mins (as per the SOA).  This probably provides enough time for 
the 5 mins cache of www.l.google.com to expire, and during that 5 to 15 
min window, things are borked, and then get better.  The strange part 
is, I can't explain why www.l.google.com would ever expire later than 
the glue records, at least not at the moment.

So TriLUGers, weigh in please.  :)  Have you had problems resolving 
Google as of late?

Aaron S. Joyner