Hey everyone,

I was wondering, why is it that some Orcon customers have a hostname that does point back to their IP, some have a hostname but it does not point back to their IP, and some don't have a hostname at all?

I have a friend in the 121.98.x.x range (is that new or old? - only recently found out there was a non 60.234.x.x range!) and they do not have a hostname at all, which is not the best for something I'm trying to do with them with IRC.

Especially with ISPs (correct me if I'm wrong here!), each client IP should have a hostname and it should have a PTR record and point back to the IP it's assigned to via an A record. I had to e-mail Orcon to get them to make mine point back, since it didn't, and a service wanted it for security. It was in the port-60-234-x-x.orcon.net.nz format, which now seems goes to orconhosting (thus none in that range work anymore, if they ever did). New hostnames (which should be pointing back by now) are in the 60-234-x-x.bitstream.orcon.net.nz format (maybe not 60-234 for the other ranges) which is what mine is now after consulting them via e-mail, where they were very happy to fix it all up for me (I did have to e-mail them twice though, since the first time only the PTR was fixed and not the actual 'pointing back' that I was after - but no problem, it was done in the end by the next day, which is what I was after) - nicely handled Orcon! :)

So yeah. Just wondering - anyone know much about this, maybe Duncan?

There was a site where you enter an IP range and it goes through checking the hostname for each IP in that range, but sadly I forgot the address - will look it up and if I find it I'll edit it into this post (helps when you want to query a bunch of IPs in a specific range and really don't want to do it manually ;D).

For the time being, you can use:

http://www.heise-online.co.uk/networks/tools/dns-query

To lookup DNS stuff for your own IP if you're interested!