DNS transfer: where is my “www”?

Question

I am in a middle of a DNS transfer. (Lets say my url is 'example.com')

The example.com URL points to the new IP address, but www.example.com still takes me to the old IP, what can I do about this?

Answer 1

Did you reduce your TTL to a shorter time before the transfer? If not, then your A record for www may still be cached by resolvers and there's nothing you can do to expire the cache sooner.

For more information, see How to Speed Up DNS Propagation.

Answer 2

It can take days to propagate around the Internet.

Try from a different computer using a different ISP or the tools at http://www.dnsstuff.com/

Answer 3

Maybe it's still in the cache. Assuming windows, in cmd.exe enter the following:

   ipconfig /flushdns

and test again.

Answer 4

Firstly, check that your name server actually works properly. Under Linux use

dig @your.name.server www.example.com

and check that it does what you want it to do. Under Windows, use nslookup and once you're at the prompt (start it in interactive mode) change the name server to your name server, then enter www. example.com and check the results.

If these tests come back OK, then it's simply a matter of waiting (as pointed out by other answers, in the future it's a good idea to keep your TTL short if you're planning to make changes).

Answer 5

You can try changing your dns lookup servers on your computer to OpenDNS, to get a second point of view if caching is the problem. You'd set the DNS settings on your own computer to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.

I've a couple times had it where my ISPs hadn't updated but the OpenDNS servers had.

Answer 6

You never did anything during testing like...I don't know...alter a host file or manually point or alias that name on the web server to point at an IP, or did something to an internal DNS cache somewhere?

What does a dig for your domain show, and nslookup?

Answer 7

try: dig +trace www.domain.com

Answer 8

just for clarity's sake, www is a different record than the domain's root A record...www must be specifically declared in the zone file.

Sorry if that's stating the obvious, but the OP doesn't sound like that's the case.

An example:

$ORIGIN .
$TTL 86400      ; 1 day
blahblah.com             IN SOA  ns3.foobar.com. techcontact.foobar.com. (
                                2009060401 ; serial
                                86400      ; refresh (1 day)
                                10800      ; retry (3 hours)
                                604800     ; expire (1 week)
                                86400      ; minimum (1 day)
                                )
                        NS      ns2.foobar.com.
                        NS      ns3.foobar.com.
                        A       1.2.3.4
$ORIGIN blahblah.com.
www                     CNAME   blahblah.com.