Domain DNS trouble

[duckxtales]

Okay, I have a domain #*$!.com and its currently registered under my friends name and he forgot to renew it. It's also a reseller account on one of the hosting services and we have about 10 domains under this #*$!.com. I'm surprised these 10 sites are still up even though we kind of lost the #*$!.com.

I would like to understand why these 10 domains are still up and running. When I ping them, they do point to the server IP, but i have their DNS as: server.#*$!.com, but it doesnt exsist anymore since it has not been renewed yet. How and why does this work?

thanks

[mcavic]

So, domain A has its DNS servers on domain B, but domain B is expired.

Two possible reasons. DNS information can be cached for up to a couple of days depending on the settings. But more likely, I believe the root servers cache the IP of your DNS server forever until you change it. If they didn't, they wouldn't know where to get that info.

So when you do a DNS lookup for domain A, the root server probably gives the IP of domain A's DNS server, bypassing any queries for domain B.