How long it takes for domain registrar to update TLD name servers

Question

We accidentally changed the nameserver settings for our example.be.

The changes were rolled back within minutes. So nameservers were set to the previous ones, provided by One.com. After 16 hours, our website still not working. But are worried that the TLD name servers still do not have nameserver records for our domain.

dig mydomain.be +trace or dig example.be NS @a.ns.dns.be all reply NXDOMAIN and no nameservers are returned for the domain.

Is it normal that after 16 hours of waiting, TLD name servers still have not been updated and there are no records of our domain?

UPDATE

Finally, we got a helpful response from our domain registrar. Here is what they told us:

this should be fixed now there was an error on the propagation in which the propagation has stuck.

the hostmasters are continually monitoring this unknown error to check if this is a one time error or not

I believe the problem was that our domain registrar did not propagate updated nameservers to the TLD name servers, that are responsible for .be domain names.

In one minute after their response on the support chat, I could run dig mydomain.be +trace and see that the changes were propagated.

Give us the domain so we can take a look. – ceejayoz Aug 03 '17 at 15:41 — ceejayoz, Aug 03 '17 at 15:41

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 06 '17 at 17:27

There are various times involved in your case:

the delay between the registrar accepting your change and the registrar sending, typically with EPP, your change to the registry; in most cases this should be almost immediately, but it all depends on the registrar and some cases like maintenance either on registrar side or registry side may create delays at this step
after the registry got the change, it has to be reflected both on whois and on registry authoritative nameservers. These are most of the time two separate paths.
1. whois may be almost immediate or not, but does not suffer "propagation" issues; you just have to make sure to query registry whois server and not other ones. The fact however that it gets updated has no practical consequences on the resolution (DNS) part of the problem
2. as for DNS some registry update their servers live, others do it like once per hour or day, etc. Your registrar should be able to inform you what is the specific delay involved here
after the authoritative nameservers are updated there is the "propagation" time, which is in fact a poorly term, since the change does not go from top to bottom at all. This is where you should always use dig for troubleshooting and explicitly specify the nameserver to query, and it should be the authoritative one at least at beginning of investigations; because if you do not specify anything, dig will use the default recursive one, which will cache the result, which will be a the result before the change and it will be kept during the TTL specified previously in the old record and/or the default at registry.

PS: for better troubleshooting provide the domain name involved, otherwise things are pure speculations...

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 03 '17 at 08:41

2

Did you try to refresh you local dns server. sometimes the local dns server refresh time set to very long, you have to manually refresh the local dns buffer.

answered Aug 03 '17 at 08:41

ben

21
2

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 03 '17 at 12:05

Break Down your issue in 3 Steps

First thing, you need to check whois of your domain to make sure that your DOMAIN.TLD NS(NameServer) are changed back to your desired NS (https://who.is/)

if whois shows Proper NS, then Second thing

Check your DNS records (on NS provider)

if DNS records exists and also shows what you desire then

wait for propagation, up to 72 Hours(MAX)

Meanwhile check your domain status on tools like

https://dnschecker.org/

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 03 '17 at 09:50

Have you checked your TTL ?

If it was about 86400s you have to wait more.

But sometimes things get weird with DNS propagation. They dipends on TTL and on "cron" from the application that submit changes to DNS servers. Once I had to wait two days for a similar issue.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 11 '20 at 10:02

Finally, we got a helpful response from our domain registrar. Here is what they told us:

this should be fixed now there was an error on the propagation in which the propagation has stuck.

the hostmasters are continually monitoring this unknown error to check if this is a one time error or not

I believe the problem was that our domain registrar did not propagate updated nameservers to the TLD name servers, that are responsible for .be domain names.

In one minute after their response on the support chat, I could run dig mydomain.be +trace and see that the changes were propagated.

How long it takes for domain registrar to update TLD name servers

5 Answers5