Peenie Wallie: DNS Propagation

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March 09, 2006

DNS Propagation

Unfortunately, my ISP lost the lease on my static IP address. So, they gave me a new one. My IP address has changed from 66.250.22.136 to 66.109.210.3. So, I updated my IP address with NetworkSolutions, and reconfigured my router, but it takes some time for the changes to propagate to all of the DNS servers across the internet.

This traceroute tool seems to recognized the new IP address.

This DNS Report tool seems to indicate that things are kosher.

And my router seems to be working correctly at the static IP address of http://66.109.210.3.

Lots of neat DNS tools at DNS Stuff.

Unfortunately, it takes some time for this data to progagate to the 13 international root name servers, and then more time for all the ISP's of the world to update their own DNS servers from the root servers.

Where are all of the DNS records kept?

This is slightly more complicated, but for the purpose of this overview, we'll try to keep it as general as possible. There are 2 basic places DNS records reside:

International Root name servers (13 exist throughout the world)
Your domain register, where your current DNS settings reside.

When you register/purchase your domain name on a particular "registers name server", your DNS settings are kept on their server, and in most cases point your domain to the Name Server of your hosting provider. This Name Server is where the IP number (currently associated with your domain name) resides.

The entire hierarchy is somewhat involved, but in short, the world Root Name Servers can be considered the master listing of all DNS records, and there are currently 13 of them in the world. These name servers are where all the master DNS records are kept. The DNS server of your ISP will typically query the Root Name Servers once every 24-hours. This is how they update all of their DNS tables, which in turn, resolve www requests to the IP number of the server they reside on.

Update: I tested my web site from anonymizer.com, which is a recommended test since it uses the local dns cache files on their server, and it's working now.

Because the only change that I made was to the IP address, and I didn't change domain name servers, my transaction was processed very quickly. My web site seems to be working correctly now. The transaction took less than an hour and a half. Closer to an hour, actually.

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