So, I’ve had issues with Facebook pictures for at least a few weeks now. About half of them would just come up with the “unable to load image” icon. I experienced this in IE, Firefox, and Chrome, so I knew it wasn’t a browser issue… I figured it was a Facebook server or code issue.
I spent some time today with Wireshark to figure out where it was failing. I found that my internal DNS server was failing. This server runs W2K8 R2, and is my domain controller for my small network here. I checked the event logs, and found multiple event 5501’s– saying that it received a malformed packet from another DNS server… I did a little research on this, and stumbled upon this blog entry that details the problem:
http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/archive/2009/09/15/windows-server-2008-r2-dns-issues.aspx
I disabled the EDNS probes as the article suggested, and my problems instantly went away. Why MS shipped a default that doesn’t play nicely with standard DNS servers is beyond me… But I suppose it’s not a first… I’m just glad I’ve resolved my issue.