[lug] Weird DNS problems

[Chip Atkinson]

Greetings,

I'm having some domain lookup problems that I can't seem to figure out 
and was hoping that someone could help me or at least point me in the 
right direction.

Here's the original problem:
Mail from a mailing list that I run was producing an error when sent to 
a subscriber at qwest.net.  It is "stat=Data format error" and "DSN: 
Data format error".  A little search on the web indicated it might be a 
DNS problem. (Yes, it is DSN in the error).

I go to the name servers listed in /etc/resolv.conf and try to do a 
forward and reverse lookup of my domain, pupman.com.

$ cat /etc/resolv.conf
search pupman.com
nameserver 206.196.128.1
nameserver 204.147.80.5
(both are Qwest's name server as I send the mail out through a DSL 
connection via them.)

Forward lookups of pupman.com work on the 206 server works, but the 204 
server has an old IP from around August.  Reverse lookups don't seem to 
work at all.

Does anyone know what's going on?  I thought that name servers got the 
information from the name server listed in the whois record.  This 
doesn't seem to be the case to me becaue it's been since Aug. when I 
used the old IP and one would think that the cache at Qwest's name 
servers would have expired.  Furthermore, if I set q=any and query the 
server giving the bogus results it seems to use the right name server 
from the whois records.

I'm stumped right now.
Thanks in advance for any help.

Chip