Registration Question

[Ethan Banks]

Assuming you are dealing with Network Solutions, the root servers will be
updated with the new authoritative name server records in about 24 hours
from the time they have an approving answer to the "notify" message they
will send out to the domain guardians.  I think they load up new records at
5am and 5pm EST...not sure on that detail.

The "whois" database takes somewhat longer to reflect the new name servers,
48 hours being about average in my experience.  What "whois" responds with
doesn't affect where the root servers are actually directing the Internet
community to for your domain.  You'll find that the root servers are
directing the world to new name servers for a given domain before a whois
reflects those records.

Propagation is really an issue of the time-to-live on the domain records you
are moving.  Remote name servers will cache your records for the duration of
the TTL setting on the records.  If your domain's TTL is 30 days, then
remote name servers will hold on to that record for 30 days and use it as
authoritative until it expires.  There's no reason for a remote name server
to query about a record it already thinks it knows about, so it won't bother
asking about a record again until expiration.

A remote name server doesn't have any idea that you may have changed
anything, and so may be responding with a bogus address if you have a long
TTL on your records.  This may interrupt services within your domain if you
are changing IP subnets as well as domain name servers.  If the new servers
are giving the same answers as the old servers, then you should not see any
service loss, no.  TTL, cache, and when the world is looking at the old name
server as authoritative versus the new one is moot if the IP addresses of
your end hosts aren't changing.

/Ethan

----- Original Message -----
From: <vu.phan at intertrade.com>
To: <comp-protocols-dns-bind at moderators.isc.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2000 12:37 PM
Subject: Registration Question


| I have to change our Primary & Secondary DNS with the InterNIC for our
| domains and was wondering how long it takes for the Registering company
| to propogate to the rest of the world and if anything gets interrupted
| during this process (i.e. email, transaction flows, etc.)?