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I moved from my reseller hosting to a VPS about a month ago now. I transferred a bunch of client accounts and changed the nameservers on their domain names to match the new server. All of the accounts have been working fine.

I've been getting reports however from one of the website owners saying that a lot of users are getting redirected to an Account Suspended page, which sounds like the one that would appear if they were still visiting the old server.

I've checked the DNS A record for the domain name with whatsmydns.net and the IP address shown is for the VPS. However I checked with a different tool (preshweb.co.uk/cgi-bin/dns-propagation-tracker - sorry hyperlinks limited to just 2) and it shows the nameservers as still being set to the old one.

Old Server
Nameservers: ns1.quksdns3.net/ns2.quksdns3.net
IP address: 82.147.22.2

New Server
Nameservers: ns1.cenix.co.uk/ns2.cenix.co.uk
IP address: 94.76.247.193

Domain name causing problems
usedjohndeere.co.uk

I would have thought DNS propogation should have finished completely weeks ago. So what might have happened and does anyone know how to rectify the problem?

EDIT:

I just noticed this:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2536480/Web%20Host%20Manager%2011.30.5.3%20-%20Edit%20DNS%20Zone-142152.png

...in the Edit DNS Zone settings in Web Host Manager, I don't know what I'm doing here but I wonder if this could be fixed by changing the "ns1.quksdns3.net" listed in there to the new nameservers?

Danny
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2 Answers2

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The NS records contained within your new nameservers still have the old server names in them:

% dig +norec @ns1.cenix.co.uk. usedjohndeere.co.uk ns
...
;; ANSWER SECTION:
usedjohndeere.co.uk.    86400   IN  NS  ns2.quksdns3.net.
usedjohndeere.co.uk.    86400   IN  NS  ns1.quksdns3.net.

You need to change those to match the new names.

Resolvers looking you up in .co.uk will find your new nameservers, but then some will lookup the NS records that are actually in your domain, and find that they're different, and use those for subsequent lookups.

Having fixed the new zone data, you should also get the old nameservers updated to match the new names, otherwise "child sticky" resolvers will fail to notice the change already registered in the parent zone.

See https://serverfault.com/a/322524/216 for more info on child sticky resolvers.

Community
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Alnitak
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  • Thanks for this, I've edited the DNS zone in WHM for that account. Do I also need to get in touch with my old hosting provider and have something changed on the quksdns3.net server? – Danny Jan 04 '12 at 16:16
  • @Danny yes, either get them to remove the zone, or make sure that until such time as they do that the old servers now contain the same info as the new servers. – Alnitak Jan 04 '12 at 16:41
  • I forgot to check up on this and mark this answer as having worked earlier, sorry! I got in touch with the old hosting provider and they said they didn't have any DNS Zone records for the domain names, so after changing my DNS Zones (for quite a few accounts!) to remove the old NS records I just had to wait about a day for the problems to stop altogether! Thanks for your help! – Danny Jan 16 '12 at 16:24
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Verify that the chain from root name servers to your current name servers is correct. Root name servers most probably do point to the correct TLD servers, but from there on it is worth checking if the DNS servers have the correct data (e.g. for www.mydomain.example.com it would be worth checking that nameserver for example.com points to the correct name servers for mydomain.example.com, and that these in turn have correct data on www.mydomain.example.com).

After that you can only read on bad ISPs who break their DNS servers on purpose and contemplate ugly aspects of human nature.

Paweł Brodacki
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