At my wits end

new site won't propagate

[webwoman]

I have a new client who had a little homemade site being hosted at Yahoo. When he was ready to launch his company for real - he hired me to design a more professional site. We completed the new design 2 weeks ago, and because Yahoo does not accomodate some of the forms he wanted on the new site, I suggested he switch hosting to a company that I have had very good service with for several years.
When he tried to repoint the domain to the new Host, Yahoo informed him that his hosting and domain registration was 'bundled' and that he would have to discontinue hosting and domain registration at the same time if he wanted to move to a new host. He did this and his website and email went down within an hour.

This was over a week ago. The new registrar and Host has repointed the domain 5 times now. When I check whois at networksolutions, godaddy, register.com, and many others, it shows that his domain is pointing to the nameservers at the new host. When I check at dnsstuff.com and whois.com, it is still pointing to yahoo. Dnsstuff.com says he is stuck in a loop at Yahoo.

According to support at the new host, the continuous repoints are not 'taking' and the root is still showing Yahoo. He also says that when Yahoo forwarded the domain, they did it with their nameservers attached.

At this point, the client is ballistic. He has no website and no email for over a week. The damn thing just won't propagate.

Anybody got any bright ideas?

Thanks,

webwoman

[jdMorgan]

webwoman,

I'd contact the new domain registrar and tell them you expect the problem to be fixed, or at least identified, and fast. The least they can do is explain the problem to you and tell you where it is and who to contact to fix it. This assumes some minimal level of competence, though...

The non-propagation may be because Yahoo set some enormous time-to-live. Until that time expires, other DNS servers will see no need to check with the authoritative domain name server, and so they will not pick up the new DNS record (IP address info).

Tutorial on DNS troubleshooting: DNS oversimplified [rscott.org].

Best,
Jim

[webwoman]

jd - thank you - Is there any way for me to check the Yahoo time to live?

[jdMorgan]

webwoman,

I don't think there is... Because copies of the old DNS record exist only in secondary DNS server caches now, and no longer exist in Yahoo. If you know of a similar Yahoo-registered site, I suppose you could do a zone file transfer in Sam Spade or a similar tool, and see what the typical TTL number is.

It would be highly unusual to have a TTL of weeks, rather than hours.

I recommend you use the info at the link above to thoroughly check the whole DNS process for the domain, and make sure it is correct. It will take some time, but if you're not getting any help from the new domain registrar, it's all you can do.

Jim

[webwoman]

JD - thanks so much for your comments on this. The site propagated this morning...whew! I still don't know exactly what it was - but it sure took a long time.