What to do? Scary stuff in DNSstuff report

[cutupguy]

I ran a DNSreport at dnsstuff.com of my FQ hosted site and found a few "test fail" messages which the footnotes say "really should be fixed" They are:

Missing (stealth) nameservers "The following nameservers are listed at your nameservers as nameservers for your domain, but are not listed at the parent nameservers...you may have serious problems...be very careful they are working." Yikes! I'm gonna die!

Stealth NS record leakage Your DNS servers leak stealth information in non-NS requests...


MX A lookups have no CNAMEs

Also in the category of "A warning"
Acceptance of abuse address Your mail servers do not accept mail to abuse@mydomain.com

Multiple MX records You only have one MX record...if server is down mail may not reach you...

Can somebody explain in layman's terms what this stuff means? Is it something FQ technicians need to address? Something I'm able to address...if I knew how?

I appreciate any help!
Al

[sheila]

These aren't really "scary". But to respond to each one...

The "stealth name server" issue is because you have only listed 2 of FutureQuests 3 name servers listed in your domain registration. You can correct this by adding the third name server to your domain registration. It's really not "necessary" but you might as well since we do make it available for your use. It's not some kind of serious issue, though, if you don't.

See this link for more information:
http://www.FutureQuest.net/Services/Transfer/

In regards to the "abuse" address, you have complete control over what email addresses you accept email for. If you wish to add an address to your Email Manager for abuse@example.com (replace example.com with your actual domain), then you certainly may do so.

Note that even if you do set up an "abuse" address on your domain, this particular server will still give you an error because we do not accept bounces to multiple recipients. These make no sense and our mail system will always refuse them, and as this service only tests by sending the bounce message to multiple recipients, it will always generate an error on this test whether you have an "abuse" address set up or not.

WARNING: One or more of your mailservers does not accept mail to abuse@example.com. Mailservers are expected by RFC2142 to accept mail to abuse.

mx.futurequest.net's abuse response:<br /> >>> RCPT TO:<abuse@example.com><br /> <<< 550 Bounce messages should have a single recipient. <br />

NOTE: It appears that one or more of your mailservers rejects E-mail to the abuse@ address if the return address is <> and there are multiple recipients. The RFCs say that mailservers are required to accept E-mail to the abuse@ account, and do not say that it is acceptable to block E-mail from <> with multiple recipients. Although it is unlikely this will prevent legitimate E-mail from being blocked, it does prevent testing tools from detecting that your mailserver accepts E-mail to the abuse@ address (the only way we can work around this is by making multiple partial E-mail attempts, which could trigger anti-spam software).

In regards to the MX server warnings, this was a recent change to our MX server DNS due to testing and we used a CNAME to flip to different round-robin hosts. However, we've now removed the CNAME entry and you should no longer see the MX errors that were previously reported.

[sheila]

Oh, I wanted to add that we currently have 14 MX servers. Not one. We have one hostname for our MX servers in our DNS records, but when you do a lookup on that host it returns 14 different server IP addresses:

$ host mx.futurequest.net
mx.futurequest.net has address 69.5.6.185
mx.futurequest.net has address 69.5.6.178
mx.futurequest.net has address 69.5.6.186
mx.futurequest.net has address 69.5.6.176
mx.futurequest.net has address 69.5.6.180
mx.futurequest.net has address 69.5.6.182
mx.futurequest.net has address 69.5.6.175
mx.futurequest.net has address 69.5.6.189
mx.futurequest.net has address 69.5.6.184
mx.futurequest.net has address 69.5.6.187
mx.futurequest.net has address 69.5.6.192
mx.futurequest.net has address 69.5.6.181
mx.futurequest.net has address 69.5.6.177
mx.futurequest.net has address 69.5.6.174

[cutupguy]

Thanks for the fast and comprehensive reply, Sheila!

I feel better already!
Al

[sheila]

Cool. :)