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Originally posted by tensen
Well if they changed the ip address the domain was pointing to, it could take several days for the new ip for the domain to propogate through the internet.. Which is always a vague period of time.
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I really have no interest in some kind of a flame war here since the point I was making seemed to be entirely missed by you which essentially was that if your domain gets screwed up by your provider for whatever reason 2-10 days is a crap and vague amount of time for them to fix it. My post was also an offer to assist a fellow ENWorlder if they were having further problems with the issue. (Also, if you read the first post I had been into the sauce... ) Anyhow, the main point was your claim above that it can take several days... on to the rest....
tensen said:
Oh? So if your DNS server is pointing to its cached information of where my domain is.. And I change where my domain is, you suddenly know it? Wow.. must be great to have such instaneous change access across the internet. Wonder which world I've been living in.
Sorry about the sarcasm, but as someone that works in that industry as much as the gaming, I have a clue of what I'm talking about. Propigation is the proper term for how dns servers pass the information.
What exactly do you do "working in that industry"? Sales? Marketing? How long now?
Your comments above seem to indicate that you are someone who has run into DNS before and has a general understanding but perhaps does not understand it as well as they think. Possibly you are looking at it from a "dealing with people" perspective rather than a "this is how the technology works". Which would result in us talking across purposes since I was using the latter as a basis for my comments. Now, I don't claim to know what your situation is, because contrary to your comment below I do not "know it all". If I did I'd be filthy rich.
Since I am not one to make vague statements without backing them up, and since you felt the need to interpret "I.P.s don't need to propogate. " in the way that you did and respond with a sarcastic post to a friendly one. (BTW I.P. is not something that propogates) I will point something out about how DNS works, it might even be vaguely interesting for some of the others on the boards (Though if they really want a good night sleep when insomniomatic they can read RFC 1034 and 1035 for a full description of DNS).
DNS is a hierarchical client/server-based distributed database management system. Your client can make 3 types of queries
recursive,
iterative , and
inverse.
since the latter deals with explaining in-addr.arpa I will skip it because it is boring. In the first two the explanation of how a query is resolved for most people on the internet is as follows:
- client sends a recursive query to local domain server asking for
www.ambient.ca
- local domain server checks its zones and find that none matches requested name, it then sends an iterative query for
www.ambient.ca to a root name server.
- the root name server has authority for the root domain and replies with the IP of a name server for the .ca top level domain
- local domain server then sends an iterative query for
www.ambient.ca to a .ca name server.
- the .ca name server replies with the IP of a name server responsible for the ambient.ca domain
- local domain server then sends an iterative query for
www.ambient.ca to the ambient.ca name server.
- the ambient.ca name server replies with the IP address corresponding to
www.ambient.ca.
- the local name server replies to the client with the I.P. of
www.ambient.ca or with an error message saying the domain does not exist.
No propogation there at all. Now, suppose that we add a few more facts:
fact 1. all DNS SOA records have a TTL (Time to Live) and that time to live is almost always around the value of 86400 (That is, 1 day). Only in special situations would anyone change that. A Caching name server, and indeed a client both honour a SOA TTL and will flush the entry from the cache when it expires.
fact 2. The root servers reload each night and update.
You can see then that even with a cached entry it will generally expire after one day, and with servers reloading the zones each night then 10 days is a rediculous amount of time to expect something to update. The only reason it would take that time was if people were being lazy in resolving the issue (since this was a "problem" not some new domain setup as I understood it). The fact that Jason was able to resolve the issue relatively quickly over the phone only proves to further illustrate the point.
tensen said:
Usually a change in the ip address for a domain is simple. You change it on the dns server that belongs to the service hosting the domain. Its where people's DNS servers are pointing to to confirm. This is simple if the domain exists, and that primary DNS server is up and functioning. It happens pretty much instanteously if someone has never gone to that website before....if they had, the user's local DNS server might have cached the old IP address and will be pointing to it improperly for a few days. This is a matter of caching and nothing the host can do. If the host's DNS server has changed their IP address for some reason, and the IP address was what was listed as the primary for a domain, it will cause possible delays, until the Domain Registrar can update the master DNS and then this propigates out. This can also occur if the domain changes hosts.
This statement seems to contradict the quote of yours at the top, and is much closer to the actual workings of DNS. If you had of responded with this in the first place (even though there are a few vague points that could be argued as innacuracies) then I wouldn't have even made the comment that I did make, since your quoted statement at the top of this post is patently false as displayed by the explanation of how DNS resolves rather than propogates.
tensen said:
And, now I've rambled on longer than I wanted. Just the little wink from Will trying to sound like he knew it all was quite irritating. Since he seemed to imply some inner workings about the internet that is not consistent with life experience on my part.
As have I. I have little doubt that you will read through this post and be hot under the collar and offended and likely retort in some manner but all I will say is if you have been involved in the Internet for so long as you claim you would realize that sometimes a
is just that.... a
and this whole mess of posts would have been entirely unneccesary.
-Will
