[Techtalk] Resolving a doman name

Mary mary-linuxchix at puzzling.org
Fri Jan 21 08:49:31 EST 2005


On Thu, Jan 20, 2005, chris hardy wrote:
> assuming your ip address is 67.18.218.195 then does your browser return the
> right page when you navigate to 67.18.218.195/index.html? If so, then the
> dns just hasn't propagated yet.

If it doesn't return the correct page, it might be that the DNS is OK,
but there's an error in the virtual host configuration. Webservers
sometimes need to be told "serve out files from THIS directory when
asked for hostname1.example.com BUT server files out of THIS OTHER
directory when asked for hostname2.example.com". If you ask for pages by
IP address and there are several hosts sharing that IP

Another possible test is to scpecifically ask 67.18.218.195 for your
host's index.html

$ telnet 67.18.218.195 80       [<- you type]
Trying 67.18.218.195...
Connected to 67.18.218.195.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /index.html HTTP/1.0        [<- you type]
Host: example.com        	[<- you type, replace example.com with your hostname]
        			[<- you type -- just press Enter/Return]
[response starts here]

It's normal to allow three or four days for DNS propagation, up to a
week or so if you've switched nameservers. After this time, you should
assume that there's an actual error, which could be:

 - your registrar is pointing at the wrong nameservers (whois will tell
   you this, as will "host -t NS yourhostnamehere")
 - the nameservers are pointing at the wrong IP address ("host
   yourhostnamehere")
 - the server at the correct IP address has not been configured to
   answer requests for your host name
 - (occasionally) the DNS timeout was incredibly long. This is the
   nastiest one, because you sometimes just have to wait it out

-Mary


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