Help! Slow/Non propigating DNS

I have an issue based on the setup I am running with my server and the domain registrar. Currently my setup is like this:

I have my server being co-located in the same datawarehouse as the domain registrar. When I registered the name modemnet.biz the domain registrar (Netse.net) handled the DNS services for it with their own dns1.name-services.com servers. This also goes for any clients of mine who use this same domain registrar, the registrar uses their own service for domain management. Fortunately the registrar lets each user change to use different DNS servers if they wish at anytime.

Anyway once DirectAdmin was installed I made sure it was working, all accounts were working great. I could create a new customer and their websites would appear immediately. Propigation time was less than 10 minutes total since this is a top tear backbone registrar one hop away from a root server. Well all customer accounts have ns1.modemnet.biz as their DNS server which points to this same physical server that they accounts are located on. Everything was working great until I noticed that when a user made a change to their subdomain/DNS records the change was only limited to the local server. Meaning if my customer symgara.com made a subdomain to test.symgara.com, no one else on the internet could see this at all.The reason for that was because the registrar's domain service (dns1.name-server...) didn't receive this updated information from my webserver.

Anyway I took my first customer (symgara.com) and used them as my guinnea pig on solving this. First I went into their domain registrars account to change from the dns1.name-services.com to point to my ns1.modemnet.biz server. From there I went to the modemnet.biz registrar account and created 'A' records that pointed ns1/ns2 -> 192.216.133.217 which is my servers IP address. Well that seemed to cure the ill's because now on my home machine I am able to goto www.symgara.com, symgara.com, and test.symgara.com without problem. I can even ping ftp.symgara.com, mail.symgara.com and it all responds perfectly. Although I run into problems that anyone else I ask to ping these for me, they can't. The webpages don't load at all and the name simply isn't resolved to the IP address.

Does anyone have any advice to offer??

Bradley

How long did you wait after updating the nameserver for symgara.com. Sometimes it can take a few days for everyone on the internet to resolve it.

As far as the propagation when you were using your registrars name servers, you need to explicity set it up to send updates to them. Just changing your local records and waiting won't do it. If you were changing them manually for each customer after their accounts were created, then that would be a different story.

Well normally TTL on these servers is extremely fast. When I use the registrars domain service and log into that account and make a change to say new.symgara.com the changes are seen anyone on the internet in less than 10 minutes. After talking with a co-owner of that registrar business he said that is due to then being physically located near a main internet root server.

Unfortunately I don't have the API's, or even time to figure out how to make my DNS server send updates to the registrars server (Enom based) for faster propigation. Does anyone know how I might even be able to go about doing that, would I need to code around DA, would I need to do something specific to get my users updates on this local server sent to the main registrar immediately?

Actually it has nothing to do with DA, you need to code around BIND DNS server. There are ways to have it send update information to another server(s).

Some examples of things to look for in your named.conf file are:
Then their nameservers need to be able to accept updates from your server via the notify event or some other mechinism that is agreed upon.

Thanks for that information. I'll check into that today and do you know if there is a guide or information for specifically just this?