DNS error!

[Tigger]

OK, sommat distinctly odd is going on here! A friend registered the free domain:

http://www.-sas-.tk

to forward to an area of my webspace. Everyone I've spoken to says it works but when I try it I get a Gateway Timeout - DNS lookup error!

I've had a look into it and you shouldn't even be able to see a domain which starts or ends with a "-" but it only seems to be me who has a problem with it!

I'm running Win2Kpro with ie5.5 and try as I may I can't get it working and can't ping the site. Other people with different OS's and browsers can go straight to it though!!!

Anyone any ideas?

[R J]

XP on I.E v6.0 ok here

[fugjostle]

Fine on IE6 on Win2K.. I suspect that its more likely DNS trouble rather than client side.

---
Fug

[The Frog Meister]

IE5.00 Win NT 4 all fine here

[fugjostle]

I'd guess that your browser is timing out before your ISP contacts the authoritive DNS at the .tk servers.

Is there a number displayed before the message like "504"? In my experience these faults tend to get fixed within a 24 hour period but in this case RFC 1035 specifies that the only characters that should be present in DNS names are:

The uppercase alphabetic characters A - Z
The lowercase alphabetic characters a - z
The digits 0 - 9
The hyphen (-) character

RFC 1035 also specifies that labels are case insensitive and are required to begin and end with a letter or digit character.

So technically speaking, domain names starting or ending in a hyphen shouldn't be valid which may explain the problem. If your ISP's DNS is old then it may not provide a lookup for the name and drop it, hence the timeout.

I think its all down to who you connect to and what you use to connect. In this day and age most people ignore RFC's and implement whatever the hell they want... that probably explains why me and RJ can do it.

---
Fug