So, got a beep this morning from our work monitoring system. One of our customers domain names is hosted with livedns.co.uk (which, as far as I can tell, is part of the Fasthosts franchise)... It appears that Fasthosts have managed to entirely break their DNS:

brettp@laptop:~$ host www.fasthosts.com
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
brettp@laptop:~$ whois fasthosts.com | grep -i "Name Server"
   Name Server: NS1.FASTHOSTS.NET.UK
   Name Server: NS2.FASTHOSTS.NET.UK
Name Server: NS1.FASTHOSTS.NET.UK
Name Server: NS2.FASTHOSTS.NET.UK
brettp@laptop:~$ whois fasthosts.net.uk | grep -A 2 "Name servers:"
    Name servers:
        ns1.fasthosts.net.uk      213.171.192.252
        ns2.fasthosts.net.uk      213.171.193.248
brettp@laptop:~$  host -t ns fasthosts.net.uk 213.171.192.252
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
brettp@laptop:~$ host -t ns fasthosts.net.uk 213.171.193.248
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
brettp@laptop:~$

So, that's fasthosts core nameservers not responding, good start! They also provide livedns.co.uk, so lets have a look at that:

brettp@laptop:~$ whois livedns.co.uk | grep -A 3 "Name servers:"
    Name servers:
        ns1.livedns.co.uk         213.171.192.250
        ns2.livedns.co.uk         213.171.193.250
        ns3.livedns.co.uk         213.171.192.254
brettp@laptop:~$ host -t ns ns1.livedns.co.uk 213.171.192.250
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
brettp@laptop:~$ host -t ns ns1.livedns.co.uk 213.171.193.250
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
brettp@laptop:~$ host -t ns ns1.livedns.co.uk 213.171.192.254
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

So, erm, apparently that's all their DNS servers "Not entirely functioning correctly"! That's quite impressive!