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inac
Asked: 2010-06-30 01:12:29 +0800 CST

Dig vs Whois on Nameserver Update and Reference to Unknown FQDN?

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After running a dig on an old domain name moved from an old server to a new one, completely different IP and provider, I ran a dig and found that the listed nameserver does not match the one in the whois. The whois shows the new nameserver, but the dig shows the old. Which one is more accurate?

Also, the dig shows an additional FQDN that I've never seen before. The {bracketed} have been replaced with general identifiers.

@root: dig +nocmd {domain.com} any +multiline +noall +answer

{domain.com.} 14400 IN A {IP address}
{domain.com.} 86400 IN SOA {old name server.} {unknown, never-been-referenced domain} (
2010062900 ; serial
86400 ; refresh (1 day)
7200 ; retry (2 hours)
3600000 ; expire (5 weeks 6 days 16 hours)
86400 ; minimum (1 day)
)
domain-name-system ip hostname fqdn dig

2 Answers

  1. whois is essentially a contact database and whilst it may mirror some details from DNS, DNS is the authoritative source, not whois.

    {domain.com.} 86400 IN SOA {old name server.} {unknown, never-been-referenced domain}

    {old name server} is the master name (MNAME) server field in your zones SOA record. This isn't relevant to clients resolving records in your domains.

    {unknown, never-been-referenced domain} is the responsible name (RNAME) field in your zones SOA record and is actually not a domain name, but an email address for the person responsible for the zone. The first label text (text before the first period) is the mailbox name and the remainder is the destination domain. Eg: hostmaster.example.com would become [email protected].

    By the by, not including your actual domain is a useless hindrance to getting people to help you.

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  2. What do you mean the "The whois shows the new nameserver"? whois is not for determining nameservers. whois is used to check what the registrar that the domain name is registered at reports the name server to be set at. Which could be bogus. AFAIK, no name resolution tools or software use this info. They do a name query to a name server's port 53. If the whois server reports something incorrect to you, maybe there is something funny with the whois server.

    dig can be used for lookups.

    If you are worried about your nameserver settings, try an online tool. Maybe try http://www.checkdns.net/quickcheckdomainf.aspx

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