When using Squish to check an A record lookup for our web server, I receive the following unexpected result:

30.0% of queries will end in failure at 217.79.164.131 (ns2.nic.uk) - query timed out

The other 3 entries returned are exactly as expected showing correct results for all our 3 Nameservers.

What I am puzzled at is why does ns2.nic.uk get asked for the A records for this www server at all? The zone file at our ISP contains only the correct references for our 3 Nameservers so the lookups should only go to them.

Where is the misconfiguration that causes this most likely to exist?

Many thanks for you assistance

Dee Eness

UK domains are hosted by Nominet, and thus the parent zone for all UK domains is at Nominet.

The root nameserver (.) delegates to Nominet (.uk) which delegates to your nameservers (whatever.co.uk).