RobG

Hello,

As a member of your friendly tech support crew I see a LOT of questions/concerns/confusion about DNS and that evil little thing we call 'propagation'. I thought it might be helpful to throw up some preliminary information to help clear this up for people. By all means let us know if you are having trouble, but here is a little bit of information to help make this all more clear.

Firstly I would like to introduce my two best friends.

DNSstuff.com
DNSreport.com

Get to know them well. I will use surpasshosting.com as my domain in the following examples.


Lets start with the domain name registration. For this I am going to reference DNSstuff.com
If you visit this page on the left about half way down there is a section called "whois" lookup. If you plug your domain into this you get a full report of the information with which you registered, who your registrar is, and when your domain was created and expires. If you get nothing at all, your domain is not registered. If you notice that your domain expired a couple of days ago... you need to renew it. This is a good place to start when you are having issues resolving your page.

Assuming all of this is in order lets pop on over to DNSreport.com

This one looks simple enough, just throw your domain into the box on the left and click left and the magic of the internet returns a quite intimidating report (which we hope has very little RED in it). I will provide a quick breakdown of this from top to bottom.

Parent:
Everything you see in this category pertains to your domain registrar. You will see the nameservers you have listed at your domain registrar. If these are not right, then you will need to fix this. You will also see the IPs listed at your domain registrar. Most importantly, this information should be IDENTICAL to the information listed in the very first part of the NS category.

NS:
The very first entry, as mentioned above, should match the info listed at your domain registrar. This is what the server has listed as your nameservers. If this is incorrect you will need to contact us at support to get it fixed. The second item is "mismatched glue". If this is red it is not necessarily an issue, depending on what it says. Now please note that if the first entry doesn't match the one at the top... lots of other things will be red, but in generally only worry about whichever one comes first, the rest depend on this. If your nameservers end in .com and your domain ends in .anythingelse you will have a mismatched glue warning, but this you can ignore. In general, yellow is not a bad thing at all. Even the most healthy pages contain some yellow. If you get stealth nameservers warnings it is likely because your nameservers are not listed the same on the server as it is with your registrar. If your report fails from the SOA category down, your Namervers are pointing to a server which either has a bad zone file or is not home to your account at all. The rest of the report is not really anything that the user needs to worry about, and very very rarely ever has any failures which are not related to nameserver entries. At the very bottom in the WWW category you will notice an IP adress. This is what your nameservers are reporting your Site IP adress to be.


Ok, all of that being said there are two little demons which hide in this whole process. One is 'Propagation' and one is 'Cache'.

Propagation: I am sure many of you have dealt with this. When someone is refering to DNS propagation what they are refering to is the time delay it takes for all of the various servers in the internet/dns process to get an updated copy of whatever you change. You can monitor this to some extent via running a dns report. 24/48 is normal. 2 weeks is not. If after 3 days something is still wrong contact support.

Cache: DNS Cache is your (Computer, Browser, ISP)'s way of preventing you from having to query the nameservers every time you access a page. This is good for effeciency. HOWEVER when something changes... it can be extremely frustrating. Some things to do if:
You get a "cpanel:no page is configured at this adress" error.
Your page display's someone elses page.

Go to dnsstuff.com and ping your domain via the box on the right. Then go to a windows command prompt and run "ping yourdomain.com" Compare the IPs. If they do not match, your information is cached incorrectly.

If you get a message saying that your page cannot be found at all, try the same process as mentioned above, and also check the DNS report.

If you have determined that your information is cached incorrectly:
1) run "ipconfig /flushdns" from a windows command prompt.
2) use ctrl F5 to force your browser to refresh the page.
3) restart your computer and router
4) If none of these work but it is still giving you a bad IP... It could be your ISP which has cached this and you will need to either contact them or wait 24 hours for it to clear.


Hopefully that helps a little. If you are still confused, by all means submit a ticket to us at support. We do not do support via this forum, but I thought it would be helpful to atleast have some information out to help so that people do not see the cpanel page and suddenly think their account has been removed. By all means contact us at support as most of these problems we will have to fix for you, but if you have already run a dns report and you can tell us where it fails or what seems to be wrong, that shaves time off of our response to you and everyone in general!

Happy Hosting : )

Regards,
Rob

belder

Rob G is one of the poor tech support people that have had to endure my questions the last few days. Many thanks for this post. I've made four new friends the last two days with Rob, Jason, Eric and Mark. Thanks for your patience and also not insisting that I move to another service. <g>

Unregistered

I love what I do. I wouldn't be here on this forum posting information voluntarily outside of work if I didnt! The thanks I get when everything works makes it all worth while to me. Happy Hosting

Regards,
Rob

H

Interesting.. It let you post as a guest? I didn't even think you could read the forums without being logged in anymore.

Excellent information in your post. Should be helpful when helping people in the future (just direct them here!).

DewKnight

stickified. also edited in the url's you posted to links for us lazy people. Rob rules.

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Ancyru

Part of my signature already.

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Unregistered

Hey, I bought a package on Sunday, it has propogated any everything, everyone else but me can view it, I think my ISP (Tiscali UK) have cached it wrong, how the hell can i get round this problem? it's doing my head in!

Bigjohn

in windows open a command prompt (start / run / cmd <enter>), type "ipconfig /flushdns" (without quotes, of course) <enter>

See if that fixes it up.

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Unregistered

thanks mate, but I've already tried that, and to no avail. Infact, I'll post an image of everything I've tried below:



it's starting to annoy me ¬_¬

Thanks in advance