So, you should expect problems when you move your server to a new IP and don’t bother to update the InterNIC registration for your nameservers. It’s an area where I don’t have much experience, so I had to go looking for the solution.

Paul Woutrs gave some tips to get started in his short document on the subject. But the real lesson there was that I had to go back to the registrar where I’d originally registered the nameserver objects to change the registration. In Paul’s case that meant going back to Verisign, and in my case it meant Dotster. Fortunately I still have an account there, and Paul’s tips gave me the language I needed to navigate Dotster’s FAQs.

It was in thos FAQs that I found a link to the Verisign Whois Search, which has a little-used option to look up nameserver info. For some reason, that was more successful than my attempts at the command line with whois 'host ns1.maisonbisson.com'.

Also of note is the previously mentioned, and free, DNS Report service.

dns, dns problems, domain name system, glue records, internic, nameserver, nameserver registration, problems

Things went whacky with Dotster’s hosted DNS services last night. Though the problem now appears to be fixed on their end (and I’ve actually move elsewhere in my attempts to get back online), it could be a while before the bad data is flushed from caches around the world.

In the meantime, let me mention that Ryan shared with me a useful tool I’d not seen before: DNSReport.

dns, dns problems, dns report, dotster, hosted dns, problems