[dns-operations] A question about changing nameservers

[Roy Arends]

On May 28, 2013, at 11:07 AM, Feng He <fenghe at nsbeta.info> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> My platform DNSbed.com has cloudwebdns.com as the nameserver domain.
> The DNS of cloudwebdns.com is currently hosted by:
> dns1.registrar-servers.com.
> dns2.registrar-servers.com.
> dns3.registrar-servers.com.
> dns4.registrar-servers.com.
> dns5.registrar-servers.com.
> 
> Today I changed the nameservers to our own nameservers:
> ns1.cloudwebdns.com.
> ns2.cloudwebdns.com.
> ns3.cloudwebdns.com.
> ns4.cloudwebdns.com.
> 
> I have added the zone to named.conf, created zone files, and reloaded BIND. But when I added a record by nsupdate, it got the error:
> 
> response to SOA query was unsuccessful
> 
> When I dig to localhost:
> dig cloudwebdns.com soa @localhost
> 
> Got the status ServFail.
> 
> Can you tell me what has happened?

It seems that ns1/ns2/ns3/ns4.cloudwebdns.com is indeed now serving dnsbed.com.
If you want to update the zone 'dnsbed.com', nsupdate will try to find the primary authoritative server, by issuing an SOA record for dnsbed.com, which results in:

dnsbed.com. SOA ns0.cloudwebdns.com. {etc,etc}

So, that response obviously worked, however, nsupdate will now try to send an update to ns0.cloudwebdns.com. (209.141.56.35).

That address (209.141.56.35) is not publicly responding for dns. So, unless your localhost interface is on that exact system (209.141.56.35), you won't get a response from ns0.cloudwebdns.com.

Hope this helps, but I might be on the wrong track here. 

Roy